Hullabaloo

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

 
Who's On First?

Pressed on how Iraq would assume sovereignty amid weeks of spiraling violence, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called June 30th "just one step in a process," and not "a magical date" in which the U.S.-led occupation will shift responsibilities to a new Iraqi government.

But at a news conference last Friday with British prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush said of the June 30 handover:

"One of the essential commitments we've made to the Iraqi people is this: They will control their own country. No citizen of America or Britain would want the government of their nation in the hands of others and neither do the Iraqis. This is why the June 30th date for the transfer of sovereignty will be kept."

digby 4/20/2004 03:09:00 PM |

 
Crisco Drippings

This is obviously one of those days designed to make me feel like I'm not completely going crazy. (I'm grateful for this because I have a terrible cold and I feel like driving my car into a guard rail to end the misery.) But, glory of all glories, the Washington Post has published an editorial taking Attorney General Ashcroft to task for his disgraceful testimony last week.

IN HIS TESTIMONY last week before the Sept. 11 commission, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft loosed a remarkable attack on Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member who served as deputy attorney general during part of the Clinton administration. The "single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem," Ashcroft said, "was the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," and the "basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained in a classified memorandum" from 1995 -- which Mr. Ashcroft had conveniently declassified for the hearing. "Full disclosure," he said, "compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission" -- that is, Ms. Gorelick. Mr. Ashcroft's allegations, which triggered criticism and demands for her resignation from prominent Republicans, are grossly unfair.

[...]

Pretending that such a deep-seated institutional problem was Ms. Gorelick's single-handed creation should have been beneath the attorney general.

It wasn't all that much commented upon as far as I can tell, but it truly was one of the most shocking performances by an Attorney General I have ever seen. As I wrote in my mildmannered piece entitled Consummate Prick:

Has there ever been a more blatantly partisan Attorney General than the Crisco Kid? This testimony today was contemptuous, dishonest and disturbingly inappropriate.

I also haven't heard anything from Senator Kill Bill yet about citing Thomas Pickard for perjury:

BEN-VENISTE: And you told the staff according to this statement that Mr. Ashcroft told you that he did not want to hear about this [terrorism] anymore. Is that correct?

PICKARD: That is correct.

Ashcroft denied he ever said that. Somebody's lyin' under oath.




digby 4/20/2004 02:35:00 PM |

 
Junior Mint

President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.

The Joint Chiefs' staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen's mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.

Mmmmm. Candy.




digby 4/20/2004 01:48:00 PM |

 
Pushn' Polls

Josh and Atrios discuss the new polls showing Kerry falling behind even though Bush has had the worst couple of weeks of his presidency. Quite rightly, Democrats are asking, "what will it take?" Both bloggers ponder the idea that this is because "the president gains as national security and war issues become more salient, even if they are becoming more salient because of what seem to be objectively bad news about his policies."

I think this is essentially correct. People associate war leadership with Bush and when the war is in the news some still feel a rally 'round the president effect. But more importantly, I think it is because John Kerry was becoming a cipher. Without him out there offering a strong rhetorical counter argument, people who don't pay attention to the details get the impression that he's not offering any alternative.

I said a couple of weeks ago:

It's one thing for Kerry to allow Bush to swing in the wind on the pre-9/11 stuff. Let the widows and the whistleblowers take that on. The less partisanship the better. But, Iraq is something else entirely.

Iraq is a crisis and an ongoing problem and it isn't enough for it to be seen blowing up on television. Kerry has got to convince people that Bush is the problem and that he can fix it. Instead, he's acting clueless and disengaged.

A lot of my readers commented that he shouldn't allow himself to get caught up in a specific plan and that his best bet was to lie low. I agree that he needn't offer a specific plan, but I disagreed that he should lie low. I believe that he needs to offer some hot, critical rhetoric about Bush's mistakes and that he should simply say, over and over again, that Bush can't solve the problem because Bush is the problem. I suggested he say (among other things):

"...this crisis untimately requires a political solution and George W. Bush has run out of political options. A new president and a fresh start are what's required to fix this problem. Only then can we rebuild the trust of our allies and go back to the drawing board with all the parties and set a proper course for a free and democratic Iraq."

Not that I have any illusions that his people are reading this blog, but I was nonetheless I gratified to hear him on Russert and quoted in USA Today saying:

More U.S. troops and a new president could be needed to win international support for U.S. efforts in postwar Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Sunday.The Massachusetts senator said President Bush has created a "quandary" for the nation by failing to develop a broad coalition to fight the war, to secure Iraq and to let countries that didn't fight participate in rebuilding.

"It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish our credibility with the rest of the world" and bring other countries into Iraq, Kerry said on NBC's Meet the Press.

If Kerry doesn't make it clear that Bush is the problem, there are enough people out there who are likely to do a rally round the flag bit to swing the election. Saying "I've got a plan" every five seconds isn't going to get the job done. It's about framing the election in terms of Junior's mistakes, which considering the news of the last few weeks shouldn't be all that difficult. And it has to be done with the kind of rhetoric that makes the media focus on Kerry.

Up to now, Kerry's people have been convinced that it wasn't his responsibility:

A Kerry spokesman told Salon on Thursday that it's incumbent on Bush -- not Kerry -- to address the crisis in Iraq. "What has the president said about this?" the Kerry spokesman asked. "He needs to explain what his policy is, what his plan is to address what's going on right now. But he's been down on his ranch in Crawford. The spotlight isn't on John Kerry. The spotlight needs to be on Bush. He's the president, and he's the person who has carved out these policies."

That was the problem. The spotlight is on Bush and unless Kerry sticks his neck out a little bit, Americans don't even know he exists on the issue. People don't have to know what he's going to do in detail --- in fact they don't want to listen to it. But, they must be convinced that Bush has screwed up the War on Terror and that he is now the greatest impediment to fixing it before they will be persuaded to abandon the president in "wartime." It's Kerry's job to make that case and then to persuade them that his experience, his philosophy and his leadership qualities make him the better man to get that job done. The Kerry campaign made a mistake in assuming that the press could do that for them. It appears they are changing course now. We'll see if the polls improve.

Update:

Mistah Kurtz's column explains some of the problem:

When President Bush delivered a routine stump speech to a group of New Mexico homeowners on March 26, CNN and Fox News each carried his appearance for 35 minutes, and MSNBC for 33 minutes.

When John Kerry gave what was billed as a major address on national security at George Washington University on March 17, he was knocked off the screen by a large explosion in Baghdad. CNN and Fox each dropped Kerry (who had been reduced to small box) after three minutes, and MSNBC never picked him up. But as the Iraq coverage continued, all three networks carried Vice President Cheney in California attacking Kerry as weak on national security -- Fox for 28 minutes, MSNBC for 23 and CNN for 13.

In the daily battle for airtime, Bush has drawn more than three times as much live cable coverage as his Democratic challenger, yet another example of the advantages of incumbency.

A review by The Washington Post, using a video monitoring service, finds that the cable news networks have covered more Bush events and stayed with them longer. From March 3, the day after the senator clinched the nomination, through Friday, they have devoted 12 hours and 11 minutes to live appearances by Bush -- including Tuesday's prime-time news conference, which was also carried by NBC, CBS and ABC. Kerry's live cable coverage during this period: 3 hours 47 minutes.

Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt calls the coverage "a testament to who's making news. . . . We think being on the cable news programs is very important because people who follow politics and cover politics keep a close eye on their TVs during the day."

[...]


MSNBC Vice President Mark Effron says that "we take more of President Bush when he's acting in his legitimate role as president of the United States." Yet even "if he's in a plant talking about the economy, for our world, that's news." Kerry, says Effron, "hasn't exactly been out there grandstanding and making a lot of news." But most of these appearances generate newspaper stories.

Politics is TV with the sound turned off. For many Americans, if you aren't on TV, you don't exist.







digby 4/20/2004 11:59:00 AM |

 
Extension Chord

Via Catch.com, this e-mail (excerpted) from the wife of a soldier in Iraq. She describes how her husband's company was literally waiting at the airport to leave for home when their tour was abruptly extended. Her husband briefly stayed behind but the rest of his unit was ambushed on their way back and one of the soldiers was killed:

This extension was a death sentence for that poor soldier. This extension cost three children their father. And it will cost much more. And now, to touchstone: My husband signed up so that he could go to college. If we would have forseen this, there is no way that he would have put his name on that dotted line. He has missed the birth of his third child.....he could die out there. He's supposed to be sitting safe in Kuwait right now, but instead, he's in a tent because their barracks were taken over by 1st Cavalry soldiers who went in to replace them. They haven't got enough food right now, because there are too many soldiers on that base, and DoD was too short sighted to think that they might end up needing more troops. All their stuff is out to sea at the time being, so they are just sitting ducks waiting for their equipment to come back. This is a fiasco and a logistical nightmare. DoD and Rummy have been denying that there is a troop shortage for MONTHS! General Shinseki predicted this and was forced to retire. In November, Senator McCain called for at least 15,000 more troops. Well, shucks, seems they were right after all.

This is why grunts in the military coin phrases like FUBAR, although this ranks right up there with the FUBARest civilian brass in history. Rummy simply refused to entertain the idea that his RMA, electronic battlefield, third wave wet dream wasn't working. Now, the shit comes down and you've got troops being extended at the very last minute and they don't even have enough food.

I heard McCain on the radio yesterday saying something about mistakes are always made in battle and yadda, yadda, yadda. He cited McArthur's gloriously successful Inchon landing maneuver which was followed by his absurd calculation that the Chinese wouldn't push back into the south as an example of a major achievement followed by a major mistake. Of course, he fails to mention that McArthur followed up that major mistake by insisting that we should start WWIII, and got fired for it, so I'm not sure how much water that argument holds. In any case, we are reaching a point where somebody needs to be fired. For my money, if you want to take care of the ongoing FUBAR problem, that somebody should be George W. Bush.




digby 4/20/2004 11:00:00 AM |

Monday, April 19, 2004

 
You Can Believe Me or You Can Believe Your Lyin' Eyes

Michael Tomasky gets to the point. It's really very simple:

My overwhelming reaction to the 60 Minutes segment on Bob Woodward's new book and the reports and leaks about the book over the weekend is that Woodward's account shows a man who just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to do this job. This may not strike some readers as a newsflash, I know, but Woodward does shed some new light on the question. Bush took this country in a radically new foreign-policy direction without really thinking through the consequences of his actions; without reckoning in a serious way with the question "What if we're wrong?"; without seeking the input of aides who might have disagreed or painted a more complex picture than the one he wanted painted for him. It's a profoundly irresponsible way to govern.

What his defenders will continue to call his "idealism" -- the belief that God put him in the Oval Office to spread liberty's bounty across the globe and so on -- is in fact a rather shocking shallowness. It's fine and indeed admirable for a world leader to speak this way, to aspire to greatness and fairness for his nation and for the world; Tony Blair did so in the run-up to the war, and his pro-war speeches were considerably more convincing than Bush's. But clearly, Bush actually believes this and looks at global geopolitics this way. This, too, might be fine, if it were balanced by more hard-headed and skeptical assessments, but Bush seems to have embraced it as a totalizing explanation. And as such, it has barred other interpretations of world events at the door.

Even this might be fine, if the consequences had not been so tragic. But once Bush transformed himself in his mind into God's messenger of liberty, things like the State Department's multi-volume report on post-war Iraq -- a report that predicted many of the tragedies that have come to pass -- became irrelevant. What was the research of mere mortals next to the fiery inscriptions of God, emblazoned across his welcoming mind?

And so hundreds are dead today who didn't need to die, because the possibility of their deaths was not supposed to be part of the great plan and therefore was not contemplated in its mandated fullness. There exists no acceptable definition of "idealism" by which the above qualifies as such. Neither is it quite malevolence. Dick Cheney is malevolent, all right, but he's not the president, at least officially; not the one making the final call. It is incompetence. It is shallowness. To put it more colloquially, it?s trying to wish something true; we've all done it in our private lives, so we all know how irresponsible it is.

And it's happening because the guy in charge doesn't know any better. Our first impression was, catastrophically, right.

Yessiree. But to listen to bespectacled, waspy, Episcopalean beltway insider Fred "Nascar" Barnes, this is wrong because "real Americans" like him don't need no stinkin' Kissingerian nuance.

I'll leave it to the inimitable Charles Pierce to retort:

One of the reactions to C-Plus Augustus's prime-time blithering that makes me truly angry is the notion that only elitist Blue Staters expect the president to get from a subject to an object without breaking an ankle, but that the good plain-spoken average American doesn't cotton to such book-larnin', consarn it.

What a huge steaming crock of beans. One of the nice things about being a sportswriter is that you actually get to see a lot of the country and you get to meet a lot of its people, many of them living in places that people like David Brooks and the Crazy Dolphin Queen visit only in their smug condescension. I have seen the sun rise over the Piedmont and I have seen it set over the Mississippi Delta. I know the way Puget Sound looks on a clear morning, and the way the snow blows straight up off the surface of Lake Superior on a cold afternoon. I know how the Ohio sounds, and how it sounds different from how the Fox River sounds. I have played bingo in Wisconsin and I have played poker in Reno and I have gambled on horses in the sweet breezes of Keeneland. I've seen Tracy Chapman in a subway, and Muddy Waters on a midway, and Bob Dylan at Bally's Grand on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. I have seen Michael Jordan play. I have been around.

Don't tell me what this country and its people think -- and, especially, don't be using that "We" thing to do it. Don't tell me that, as a nation, we can't distinguish courage from stubbornness, philosophy from platitudes, and an empty suit from a full one. Don't tell me we prize simplicity when you really mean we prize the simple. Don't tell me about my country and my countrymen, you smarmy, honorarium-fattened, makeup-encrusted hyenas. Don't you freaking dare. I been there.

And, by the way, all of her Beltway Heather pals should note that Peggy Noonan this week intimated that asking the president of the United States what in the hell he's doing makes you less of a real American. Go on. Go on the shows with her again, and know the contempt she feels for your craft. Then, go home and break every damn mirror you own.

It is foolish for Democrats to buy into the notion that it is too dangerous to question Bush's competence to do this job. That is blatent GOP propaganda designed to cow us into discarding a potent argument. The vast majority of American people don't follow politics to the extent that we junkies do and they don't care all that much about the details. But they are remarkably good at cutting through the bullshit when it's right in front of them.

Throughout the 90's the Republicans cried wolf on average of once or twice a week. Clinton was the anti-christ. A corrupt, murdering, philandering communist was running the country. When he was finally caught with his pants down (literally), the American people were fascinated but unmoved. His approval rating remained strong even through impeachment procedings. And that, of course, is what saved him.
And it was because they believed what they saw with their own eyes --- a competent president caught in an entertaining political spectacle that didn't affect their lives.

Bush is dumb. People can see that with their own eyes, too, and Fred Barnes knows it. That's the real subtext of that whole "the grown-ups are back in charge," nonsense. Most people thought that Bush was a middle of the road fella who would listen to his Dad if anything big came up and would calm the partisan waters. After all that wild sex with Clinton he was supposed to be the cigarette in the afterglow. But, they knew he was dumb. Times were so good that quite a few people didn't think it mattered all that much who was president.

After 9/11, people wanted to believe that Bush had risen to the occasion because it was too frightening to think otherwise. The GOP successfully framed criticism as lack of patriotism. And, as with Clinton's TV soap opera, the press liked the big budget war movie. So, for a short time Bush was seen as bold, resolute, strong, decisive, whatever. Unfortunately for him, he then made the huge mistake of selling a war on a demonstrably false premise. They can try to ignore that big fat GOP elephant in the middle of the room, but it isn't going away. There are no weapons of mass destruction and Bush is babbling about turkey farms and mustard gas. He can't testify before the 9/11 commission without Vice President Gepetto. Republicans are writing tell all books about his failures even before his first term is finished. Everyone is being reminded that he never was very bright.

Now, candidates and their surrogates can't go around saying that too obviously because people will begin to feel sorry for him. But, they should be constantly talking about the complexity of the problems we face. They should discuss what leadership really is and tie it in to experience, maturity, trust and brains.

And the rest of us should use humor to hammer the point home. I'll never forget Jon Stewert's countdown of the biggest stories of 2000. The top story of the year was Florida, naturally. We'd been watching footage from the state for one reason or another for the entire 12 months. He ran down the story of the recount and the supreme court decision and then said something like "and at the center of the storm that was Florida this year was one small frightened little boy." At which point he showed a picture of George W. Bush.

It was obvious then and it's obvious now that Bush is in over his head. And Fred Barnes's protestations to the contrary are as phony as Bush senior chomping on that bag of pork rinds.




digby 4/19/2004 04:47:00 PM |

Sunday, April 18, 2004

 
Fools Rush In

The media reports of smiling Iraqis leading inspectors around, opening up buildings and saying, "See, there's nothing here," infuriated Bush, who then would read intelligence reports showing the Iraqis were moving and concealing things. It wasn't clear what was being moved, but it looked to Bush as if Hussein was about to fool the world again. It looked as if the inspections effort was not sufficiently aggressive, would take months or longer, and was likely doomed to fail.

George W. Bush, Master and Commander of the Royal order of the Codpiece had sworn that you could fool him once, but fool him twice ... won't get fooled again. And Saddam was trying to fool him.

As we all know, this is total crap because VP Gepetto had told GWB that he was going to war over a year before. The president rather endearingly thought he was making a decision that had long ago been made. He's so cute when he's confused.

You can't exactly blame the lil' guy, though. Condi Rice, obviously suffering from a late night of single gal Pinot Grigios with Gwen Ifill, groaned this pile of nonsense when Junior asked her if we should go to war:

"Yes," she said. "Because it isn't American credibility on the line, it is the credibility of everybody that this gangster can yet again beat the international system." As important as credibility was, she said, "Credibility should never drive you to do something you shouldn't do." But this was much bigger, she advised, something that should be done. "To let this threat in this part of the world play volleyball with the international community this way will come back to haunt us someday. That is the reason to do it."

It isn't about American credibility it's about international credibility. Credibility shouldn't drive you to do something you shouldn't do, but if you don't do this international credibility will suffer so you should do it.

This answer explains why Condi's was the only opinion he sought. His poor head ached for days after that one.

He knew what Vice President Cheney thought, and he decided not to ask Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"I could tell what they thought," the president recalled. "I didn't need to ask them their opinion about Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear. I think we've got an environment where people feel free to express themselves."

Well, sort of:

In all the discussions, meetings, chats and back-and-forth, in Powell's grueling duels with Rumsfeld and Defense, the president had never once asked Powell, Would you do this? What's your overall advice? The bottom line?

Perhaps the president feared the answer. Perhaps Powell feared giving it. It would, after all, have been an opportunity to say he disagreed. But they had not reached that core question, and Powell would not push. He would not intrude on that most private of presidential space -- where a president made decisions of war and peace -- unless he was invited. He had not been invited.

Bush's meeting with Powell lasted 12 minutes. "It was a very cordial conversation," the president recalled. "It wasn't a long conversation," he noted. "There wasn't much debate: It looks like we're headed to war."

The president stated emphatically that though he had asked Powell to be with him and support him in a war, "I didn't need his permission."

He's so wonderfully masterful, isn't he? Especially for someone with his cognitive handicaps. It reminds me of Junior's quote in Woodward's BlowJob Part I:

"I'm the commander. See, I don't have to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

He didn't need to ask Powell for his opinion because he knew his opinion and anyway he didn't agree with it. Why bother listening to him go on and on and be so, like totally boring? Cheney and Rumsfeld were both telling him he should do it so there was no reason to ask them. They made him feel like a man. However, he did have to ask one other very, very important and highly experienced person her opinion on the matter:

"I asked Karen," the president recalled. "She said if you go to war, exhaust all opportunities to achieve [regime change] peacefully. And she was right. She actually captured my own sentiments."

It's pretty clear that Junior has no sentiments until he talks to Karen to find out what they are.

The only people Junior explicitly asked for opinions on whether to go to war with Iraq were Condi Rice and Karen Hughes. Both women told him he should do it --- Condi babbling something confused about playing international volleyball and Karen basically telling him to look both ways before crossing the street.

Meanwhile Vice President Richelieu sits in the corner saying nothing except a well timed "Saddam's toast" to our Secretary of Oil, Prince Bandar --- who is informed of our decision to go to war before anybody tells the Secretary of State.

Oh, sorry. Bush had informed one other person over the holidays:

The president also informed Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, of his decision over the holidays. Rove had gone to Crawford to brief Bush on the confidential plan for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. While Laura Bush sat reading a book, Rove gave a PowerPoint presentation on the campaign's strategy, themes and timetable.

Opening his laptop, he displayed for Bush in bold letters on a dark blue background:

PERSONA:

Strong Leader

Bold Action

Big Ideas

Peace in World

More Compassionate America

Cares About People Like Me

Leads a Strong Team

I don't think even Shakespeare could do this farce justice.






digby 4/18/2004 11:38:00 AM |

Saturday, April 17, 2004

 
Onward Christian Soldiers

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, expressed no doubts about his decision to invade Iraq, and enunciated an activist role for the United States based on it being "the beacon for freedom in the world."

"I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty."

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq, and the powerful role his religious belief played throughout that time.

"Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. ... I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness."

The president told Woodward that "I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right. I was going to act. And if it could cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so."

Wow, that's quite a sacrifice. And hey, if it costs many thousands of other people their lives he's prepared to do that too.

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."

Maybe sooner than we think.

An unelected simpleton feels strongly that he has a duty to free the world so the mightiest nation on earth has no choice but to do as he says.

Are freedom and democracy great, or what?





digby 4/17/2004 05:52:00 AM |

 
Comforting

David Brooks admits that he has always been wrong about everything, but he's sure that in 20 years he will be right about something.






digby 4/17/2004 05:39:00 AM |

Friday, April 16, 2004

 
Freedom Crusade

Both TAPPED and the Political Animal praised Ron Klain's admonition against making mock of President Bush's invocation of religion in his press conference the other night. I think it's probably true that his statement about the "Almighty" giving the gift of freedom to every human being is inspiring to many Americans and shouldn't be laughed at. . However, Klain also seems to imply that the use of the term "unalienable" rights in the Declaration of Independence somehow justifies what appears to be a new global moral crusade to "bring freedom" to the world:

Rather than laughing at the president's invocation of the notion of natural rights to justify his policies in Iraq, Democrats should make it abundantly clear that they share the president's view that all humans are created free and are entitled to enjoy the benefit of that innate freedom. After all, wasn't the idea of an "unalienable" right to liberty put into writing in 1776 by the father of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson? And more recently, haven't these been the ideals that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Gore pursued around the world -- often with great derision from conservatives?

Instead of belittling the president's reliance on the Almighty, Democrats should make clear that we share the president's goals but think that his methods have been deeply flawed. The mission may be from above, but the planning has been from someplace else.

I don't belittle his reliance on the Almighty, but straying from that to a messianic message of "spreading freedom" is quite obviously translating into the belief that the United States may use this as a pretext to invade countries irrespective of international law and civilized behavior. That kind of "liberation" is a goal I most vehemently do not share because the truth of the matter is that the United States is not imbued by the Almighty with omnipotence or any special claim to goodness and wisdom. Our crime statistics our justice system our poverty rate and any number of other serious flaws in our society prove this.

Freedom is a wonderful thing and I'm all for it, but I am a long way from being convinced that the United States of America is the best of all possible free worlds and I am deeply concerned by the idea that we are empowering leaders to take the position that we are so spectacularly superior to all other nations that it is an unalloyed good thing to "free" people around the world, including little children, even if it kills them. The price for this kind of liberation for many an individual is extremely high. It is very, very arrogant to assume that people are willing to pay it.

This is one good reason to have international institutions and a requirement for consensus before nations can go willy nilly "liberating" others. What we may see as "liberation" is oppression and exploitation to someone else, even within the US itself. We are not equipped either morally or intellectually to take this task upon ourselves. We simply do not have all the answers and Thomas Jefferson would be the first to admit that.

This is some dangerous shit, people. This is the kind of thing that makes people start humming "Ride Of The Valkyries," and talking about Ubermenschen. I thought the shop worn myth of American Exceptionalism was disturbing but the "American Freedom Crusade" scares the hell out of me.






digby 4/16/2004 05:24:00 PM |

 
Bush and Blair Transcript

Q: Mr. President, some of your critics are saying that it's a political ploy by you to stand firm to this June 30th deadline, especially that you don't have an Iraqi organization to transfer power over to. What do you say to that? And what organization would you like to see transferred power over to - both of you, if you could answer that?


BUSH: The important thing to know is that if you look into an Iraqi soul you will see someone who doesn't know what time it is. See, you have to remember these people come from a place where if you cut 'n run you wind up raped in a grave, gassed and maimed and they can't forget that so we have to be tough and stay the course. That's why I will lead a coalition of the willing and I WILL disarm Saddam Hussein.

You have to understand that we don't know what fear is because we are free. And we love freedom and being free and we want everybody to be free so they can love freedom everywhere where there can be freedom and people can be free. See, that means they'll have hope. When they think we might cut 'n run and not stay the course time goes by very slowly because you think there will be maiming and torture and killing and mass graves and gassing and then you won't know what freedom is because you won't be free like we are free and everyone else should be free. That's why we will smoke 'em out o' their caves, where the evil doers hide in spider holes hating freedom.

We are great countries because we believe that freedom is for everybody not just us so we will make everybody in the world free so the world will be a better place of peace and hope.

We will show these Iraqis that because they have been tortured and maimed and raped and gassed in massive rooms with their own people that what it takes to be civilized is a document we call the TAR. It's a fantastic historic opportunity for them to learn how to protect tough minorities. I told the Iraqis we are giving them the freedom to be civilized and I meant it.

And the Palestinians have a fantastic opportunity for freedom at this historic moment, too, because they will have a solid foundation of big institutions instead of people just like us. They will live in security measures of peace and freedom. That means folks need to view it as a historic moment so the Palestinian state can live in peace with its neighbors. It's a moment we've got to seize. Because final discussion will become a lot plainer once there's a peaceful state full of hope and freedom. See, you have to understand that we think it's possible because possible is what we think it is. If the Palestinians find peace and hope and the neighbors of the Palestinians will support the emergence of hope and peace in a peaceful state of hope it will be a fantastic opportunity to love their neighbors like they'd love to loved themselves.

This is a momentous, historic seizure. But, I don't want to put words in the Prime Minister's mouth:

BLAIR: Fuck. me.





digby 4/16/2004 03:06:00 PM |

Thursday, April 15, 2004

 
Democratic Unity


Matt Stoller at The Blogging of the President has a very interesting post up about the "Democratic Coalition." I urge everyone to read it because it discusses the challenge of governing if we do manage to wrest the presidency from Junior and the Retreads.

Matt sees the Party as being split between four groups. First, there is the party apparatus which consists of Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and the writers of The Nation who are basically concerned with preserving their power. The second group is made up of those like Howard Dean and Al Gore who are forward looking and believe in refreshing the talent pool rather than clinging to outmoded power structures. Then there is group three who are essentially reformers first and politicians later, many of them the independents and third party types who might work with Democrats if they are willing to reform themselves in a way that pleases them. The fourth are leftist vanity players like Kucinich and Sharpton who are the poster children for what the wing-nuts describe as the deviant left.

I think that Matt may be a bit unnecessarily cynical about group number one and perhaps a bit naive about group number two, but aside from that, I think this is a good definition of a large portion of the party. I do think that you can't discount the various constituency groups like unions, feminists, racial minorities and gays. This is an essential part of the coalition that is represented within our party for a reason --- Democrats care about these people and Republicans don't. Identity politics is a dirty phrase invented by the Wurlitzer to disparage Democrats.

I think that we will continue to have quite a bit of tension between all of these groups because well ... we always have. The Democratic Party does not respond well to top-down hierarchical models of governance which makes us intrinsically at odds. Even FDR had a helluva time keeping it together and he had the mandate of all mandates. I can certainly understand the outrage of the Dean supporter at being asked to sign a "unity pledge" at a Democratic Meet-up:

I was and still am a Dean supporter. I cannot speak for supporters of Clark, Edwards, Gephardt, etc., but the pledge is clearly directed at those of us that did not support Kerry in the primary campaign. Apparently the Democratic Party thinks that it needs us to sign a unity pledge, to prevent us from peeling off into apathy or Naderland. I have been a Democrat all my life, and don't feel that I need to sign anything to prove my loyalty, unity, status, etc.

Beyond that, I want to focus on the reason I was attracted to Dean in the first place. It was almost a year ago that I first saw Dean speak. He stepped up to the microphone and said "What I want to know is what all those Democrats in Washington are doing voting for George Bush's [x, y, or z]." That hooked me! For the first time, here was someone that understood that for the past 25 years the Democratic Party has been bending over and accommodating the Republicans. We've been letting ourselves get steamrolled ever since Day One of the Reagan Administration, and Dean was calling the party out on it!

So I should not be expected to sign a unity pledge, or loyalty oath, or anything like it. Nor should Howard Dean. The people that should be signing the pledge, in a very public ceremony, should be Terry McAuliffe, Al From and the rest of the DLC, and all the Democrats in the House and Senate, including John F. Kerry, who voted for the Republican war in Iraq and the Republican Patriot Act, John Edwards, who voted for the Republican war in Iraq and the Republican Patriot Act, and Dick Gephardt, who co-wrote the Republican Iraq war resolution, and Wesley Clark, who had the audacity to run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency when he wasn't even a Democrat.

Those are the people that need to be demonstrating that they will stand with the party!

Like I said, I would be outraged at being asked to sign any kind of "loyalty oath." I hate stuff like that and I think it is antithetical to everything Democrats are supposed to believe in. But, surely we can all see the internal inconsistency of the argument as expressed here, can't we?

"...The people who should be asked to sign a unity pledge ...in a very public ceremony ...are anybody...I ... don't...approve...of.

Matt says that this kind of rage is the result of a traditional party structure and he believes that someday the Party will "once again emerge as a source of self-expressive pride for a majority of the citizenry." I don't know that it ever has been that, really, but I certainly think it's possible.

However, I will be my usual dark Cassandra in this argument and issue my standard warning. There is a great big political battle going on with a bunch of guys who take no prisoners. We are not dealing with our daddy's Republican Party. They are not going to disappear and they are not going to allow us to enact a progressive agenda unimpeded. We'd best take that into account because simply reforming the Democratic Party into a fighting progressive voice for change ain't gonna get it done. We need every last person for this battle from all those awful DLC'rs and Democrats in the House and Senate to John Edwards to audacious faux Dem Wes Clark to Howard Dean. We don't have to sign any loyalty oaths but we do have to be serious and mature and understand how terribly difficult and how high the stakes are in trying to govern with the sort of opposition that puts a criminal like Tom DeLay into a leadership position. They will fight with everything they have.

If the Democrats take back the White House the Republicans are going to lose their minds, not because our party is faulty because theirs is. We need to remember that. We may be imperfect, but they are nuts.









digby 4/15/2004 07:36:00 PM |

 
Midterm Election Mistakes Redux


I've been supportive of John Kerry's need to find an acceptable strategy for dealing with this mess in Iraq. The fact is that until we wean ourselves from our childish dependence on gas guzzling penis-mobiles, we are probably not going to be able to simply leave Iraq now that we have totally destabilized the region with Bush's "call" to free the Iraqi's from their lives. I do think that with a different president we might be able to summon up some sort of legitimate multinational commmitment to pour money and manpower into the country and at least make a serious attempt to help the Iraqi people create a decent political system. I don't know if it will work, but I do know that it hasn't been tried and it needs to be. Like it or not --- and I don't --- unless we clean up this mess, the national security and economic ramifications are much more severe than I think people are willing to admit.

But, I also think Kerry's framing and delivery of this message is just terrible. The choice in this is not between "cutting and running" and "staying the course" or between being "thoughtful" and "thoughtless." It is between being honest and dishonest, persuasive and bullying, succeeding and failing. Kerry needs to sharpen his words and punch up his energy. This tepid me-tooism will not work. Having said that, I do think that Kerry is substantially right on the issue of Iraq.

On the other hand, this is simply mystifying:

"I think that could be a positive step," the Massachusetts senator said, approving of the Bush-Sharon action regarding both refugees and Israel's borders. "What's important obviously is the security of the state of Israel, and that's what the prime minister and the president, I think, are trying to address."

I guess things just aren't hot enough in the mideast right now.

Honestly, you can't get any more cravenly chickenshit than this. Not only is it a monumental change in American foreign policy, it is a blatant domestic political maneuver at exactly the wrong moment.

There is a possibility that the action by Bush could further aggravate the situation in Iraq, just as Israel's killing of a prominent Palestinian militant set off rioting in Iraq several weeks ago. Independent pollster John Zogby, who has surveyed extensively in the Arab world, said: "This is pretty much the final nail in the coffin of the peace process as far as Arabs are concerned." He said his polling indicates the Palestinian cause is among the top three issues for 90 percent of Arabs in all Arab countries he has surveyed. "It's not even a political issue, it's a bloodstream issue," Zogby said

[...]


"This will make it that much harder for John Kerry to win Florida," said a Republican aide on Capitol Hill who refused to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. Associates said Bush's strategists believe that even small inroads into the Jewish vote could mean the difference between winning and losing Florida, and several Republicans believe the announcement could further inhibit Kerry's fundraising in the Jewish community.

For one thing, for Kerry to agree that the Florida Jews --- most of whom are retired New Yorkers --- will vote for Bush because of this is to completely insult them. They aren't drooling idiots like so many of the GOP's blind followers. They have enough sophistication to understand the complexity of this situation, no matter how much they may yearn for Israel's safety and security.

And they, of all people, have a mighty motivation to oust Junior from the oval office. He and his followers have been calling them idiots for the last three years for not being able to decipher Teresa LaPore's ballot hieroglyphics. They wouldn't vote for Bush if Kerry soul-kissed Yassar Arafat on Saturday night Live.

I suppose that it is possible Kerry genuinely believes that jettisoning any hope of getting rid of the settlements or even a symbolic right of return is a good idea. If so, then we have serious problems because he apparently believes that the best way to negotiate is to take all of your negotiating cards off the table. Regardless of where you hope the process wil eventually lead, this is not good. Bush got rolled and Kerry threw his arms around his neck and rolled with him.

I am honestly stumped by this. If Kerry plans to win the election by endorsing all of Bush's insane foreign policy pronouncements then it's lost before it's begun. I don't demand that he abandon all pretense of moderation or that he embrace some sort of isolationism. I wouldn't support that much less do I think it would win the election. I do however expect him to at least object to the Bush administration's crazy, fucked up neocon wetdreams that are likely to get a lot of people --- including Americans --- killed.

If this really is all about fundraising then I think Billmon has it right:

It strikes me that bin Laden has been going about this all wrong. If he'd just started his own PAC, and spread enough money around, he probably could have gotten Congress to vote to blow up the World Trade Center.

digby 4/15/2004 04:56:00 PM |

 
Faux Outrage For Dummies

The incomparable Sommerby discusses the piece of RNC propaganda posing as news on the front page of the NY Times this morning. Jim Rutenberg dutifully parrots the painfully obvious Gillespin that the Democratic 9/11 commissioners (particularly Ben-Veniste) are blind partisans who are all over the television promoting themselves at the expense of truth, God and the American Way. This talking point was ALL over GOPTV yersterday, bursting forth from the mouths of every Bush shill from Tuckie Carlson to Brit Hume. In fact, I haven't seen a case of such perfect conformity since the Taiwanese synchronized swim team got a perfect 10.

It so happens I was listening to my local NPR station on the freeway last night when I heard none other than Thomas Kean, Republican commision chairman, saying that the commission was encouraging the commissioners to give intereviews in the interest of openness. Even in the Times article he's quoted saying:

"We made a conscious decision, and part of it was under strong pressure from the families, to make this commission as transparent and as visible as possible."

I guess Cheney's stooges forgot to tell Tommy that he was supposed to keep a lid on the bad news. Let's hope Fredo doesn't find out.

Sommerby points out the obvious fact that Ruttenberg doesn't name any actual Democrats complaining about this openness (although they certainly could --- John Lehman is all over the place, too.) He says they are, but can't seem to quote one on or off the record. Maybe Zell's trying to keep a lower profile these days. But, the fact is that this is step two in the coordinated GOP effort to discredit the 9/11 committee and anyone with half a brain can spot it a mile away. (Gingerly trashing the widows was step one.)

I'm of the opinion that the single most partisan act of the commission hearings came from the Attorney General of the United States when he appeared before them and testified as if he were a political hatchet man for Dick Nixon. Now that was a little bit unseemly, in my book. (And in Gary Hart's book too.) But, apparently Jim Rutenberg loves those red kool-aid kamikazes they're serving up down at RNC headquarters so much that he can't help but grab Karl Rove's dictation and yank for all he's worth.

The NY Times is playing its useful idiot role once again. To use one of Karen Hughes's favorite words, I'm sure the Republicans find that "comforting."




digby 4/15/2004 08:12:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

 
Liberal radio stations silenced

I wondered what the hell was going on when I turned on Franken and heard Spanish language radio. I know someone who works for Arthur Liu and he's a certifiable nutcase.

Update: Air America responds






digby 4/14/2004 04:11:00 PM |

 
Yep. He's Naked

The New York Times finally notices that the Emperor has no clothes:

...his responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused.

...his rhetoric, including the repetition of the phrase "stay the course," did not seem to indicate any fresh or clear thinking about Iraq, despite the many disturbing events of recent weeks.

...Mr. Bush seemed to entertain no doubts about the rightness of his own behavior, no questions about whether he should have done something in response to the domestic terrorism report he received on Aug. 6, 2001.

...The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.

He was no more incoherent and stubbornly repetitive than usual last night. All you have to do is go back and read the transcripts of his other press conferences to see that he has always been this bizarrely robotic, unresponsive and ill informed. For some reason the press in this country decided not to notice for over 3 years that our president obviously has no grasp of the the complicated issues he faces.

It's good that they are finally beginning to say something, but an awful lot of misery could have been prevented if they had done their job and instead of regurgitating RNC lies about Al Gore had reported the fact that the Republicans had nominated an idiot to run the most powerful country in the world.

I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet...I hope I -- I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

This is the most powerful man in the world.


Update: NT Times Link fixed.

And Will Saleton has the stomach to deconstruct Junior's press conference. It's not pretty.







digby 4/14/2004 07:53:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

 
He Must Be Defeated

The Teacher's Aid in Chief lectures the American people as if they are just as stupid as he is. As usual, he filibusters with his puerile incoherent blather, going on and on and on not making any sense, projecting arrogance and ignorance in equal measure.


I am deeply ashamed to be American right now.





digby 4/13/2004 06:14:00 PM |

 
Consummate Prick


Has there ever been a more blatantly partisan Attorney General than the Crisco Kid? This testimony today was contemptuous, dishonest and disturbingly inappropriate. In any other administration someone who acted out as he did today would be fired:

Attorney General John Ashcroft strongly defended the Bush administration and himself today before the 9/11 commission, laying the blame for intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks squarely on the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Mr. Ashcroft said Al Qaeda was able to plan and carry out the attacks that killed some 3,000 people in large part because of policies of the Clinton administration and its deliberate neglect of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's computer technology.

[...]

Mr. Ashcroft said that to the contrary, he personally went to the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on March 7, 2001, and urged her to scuttle what he characterized as an ineffective policy of the Clinton administration specifying that Mr. bin Laden had to be captured, and only in a way that lawyers would approve.

"Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camp, they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture," Mr. Ashcroft said sarcastically.

Mr. Ashcroft said that he wanted "decisive, lethal action" and had told Ms. Rice, "We should find and kill bin Laden."

The attorney general sounded almost contemptuous as he spoke of a "legal wall" put into effect in 1995 to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents in an effort to safeguard individual rights.

I'm afraid that Mr Ashcroft has a strange understanding of his job description. It was not his responsibility to tell the administration that he "wanted decisive, lethal action" overseas. It was his responsibility to deal with terrorism threats in the United States, a responsibility he failed miserably to meet.

I believe that he lied outright today when he denied (under oath) that he told Picker that he didn't want to hear about terrorism anymore.

BEN-VENISTE: And according to the statement that our staff took from you, you said that you would start each meeting discussing either counterterrorism or counterintelligence. At the same time the threat level was going up and was very high. Mr. Watson had come to you and said that the CIA was very concerned that there would be an attack. You said that you told the attorney general this fact repeatedly in these meetings. Is that correct?

PICKARD: I told him at least on two occasions.

BEN-VENISTE: And you told the staff according to this statement that Mr. Ashcroft told you that he did not want to hear about this anymore. Is that correct?

PICKARD: That is correct.

Ashcroft:

"First of all, Acting Director Pickard and I had more than two meetings," Mr. Ashcroft said evenly. "We had regular meetings."

And far from turning away from briefings on terrorism, Mr. Ashcroft said, "I care greatly about the safety and security of the American people and was very interested in terrorism, and specifically interrogated him about threats to the American people, and domestic threats in particular."

All of his actions indicate that he didn't want to hear about terrorism. I'll be expecting some harsh words from Senator Catkiller on the floor of the Senate tomorrow. Words like perjury and "letter of resignation."

Yeah, I know. And people in hell want icewater.







digby 4/13/2004 05:56:00 PM |

 
Stretch?

A couple of other questions I'd like to see raised in Junior's thrid prime time news conference:

1) Three months ago you proposed an ambitious multi-billion plan to send a mission to Mars and establish a permanent base on the moon in the next few years to harvest materials to process into rocket fuel and breathable air. How much of a priority will you place on this initiative in a second Bush administration?

2) There is no mention in your speeches of your immigration proposal announced this January, allowing large numbers of foreign guest workers to temporarily work legally in the United States. Do you plan to put the muscle of the White House behind the legislation proposals sponsored by Senators McCain and Hagel this session?





digby 4/13/2004 10:14:00 AM |

 
Chutzpah

E.J Dionne quotes Bush at a fund raiser last week saying: "We stand for a culture of responsibility in America. We're changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you got a problem, blame somebody else, to a culture in which each of us are responsible for the decisions we make in life."

I heard that fundraising speech (dutifully shown in its entirely live on CNN) and I too was struck by the unbelievable irony of his statement. It's actually beyond ironic. It's deluded.

In my fantasy America a reporter would repeat those lines to Bush tonight and then ask him if he thinks there are any problems --- from 9/11 failures to the economy to Iraq --- for which he bears any responsibility.

But, I'm sure that is impossible. Instead, we will hear the "journalists" ask him something like "how soon will you be able to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq?" at which point he'll filibuster incoherently for half an hour blathering on about good 'n evul 'n thugs 'n caves 'n smoken 'em out. Then he'll tell a reporter how ugly he is and everyone willl laugh uproariously at his comedic genius and go home.



digby 4/13/2004 09:32:00 AM |

 
Ahmad At The Helm

I said the other day that I didn't know how to fix the problem in Iraq, but I do know that a good first step would be to uncermoniously dump that charlatan opportunist Ahmad Chalabi. According to this Cheney and Wolfowitz are as committed to him as ever:

Why did they do it? It seemed a safe bet to the civilian echelon policymakers at the Department of Defense when they approved Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer's fateful decision to close down the newspaper of Muqtada al-Sadr and to arrest an aide to the young firebrand Shiite cleric. Even after Shiite Iraq had erupted into fury over the moves on Saturday, April 3, top-level Pentagon policymakers were privately still convinced it was all a storm in a teacup.

A small event on Sunday, April 4, the very day after the move against al-Sadr prompted the revolt, provides the missing piece to the puzzle. For that was when the CPA announced the name of Iraq's putative new defense minister for the post-June 30 government. His name is Ali Allawi and he is a loyal, close associate of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. More, he is Chalabi's nephew.

[...]

There is no way that the move against al-Sadr was undertaken without Chalabi's prior knowledge and explicit approval. Instead, given the extraordinary degree to which the Pentagon policymakers and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to privately disparage the far more accurate, sober and reliable professional assessments of the U.S. Army's own tactical military intelligence in Iraq, it appears clear that, yet again, Chalabi was the tail that wagged the dog. He could have been expected to urge the move on al-Sadr in the first place.

The benefit to him is obvious. Chalabi believes -- as do his still-worshipful Pentagon backers -- that he has the blessing of supposedly moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the mainstream chief religious authority of the Iraqi Shiites, to take power on July 1 with the force of 110,000 U.S. soldiers and their automatic weapons behind him.

However, just as the neocons lead President Bush by the nose, and Chalabi leads them by the nose, Sistani and the Iranians have been leading him by the nose.

Sistani's policy toward the CPA and Chalabi has been no different from the way he survived as an ayatollah all those years under Saddam Hussein, which was no mean feat. Sistani is playing a cautious waiting game and avoiding the ire of those who currently are top dog in Baghdad. He will drop Chalabi -- and the United States -- at the drop of a hat as soon it becomes clear that they cannot run or tame Iraq.

[...]

The myth of Iraqization of this war is now dead. The Pentagon masterminds remain determined to push Chalabi through as prime minister and absolute ruler of Iraq de facto on July 1. GOP heavyweights have even been assured around Washington that hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks from U.S. companies to Chalabi to do business in Iraq will be used for a good cause: to spread democracy in -- read, destabilize -- neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran.

digby 4/13/2004 08:28:00 AM |

Monday, April 12, 2004

 
Political Warrior

Kos and Susan are asking: "Why is Kerry running?"

Obviously, there are many reasons any person runs for president having to do with ego and accident. After observing him for a while, I think John Kerry is responding to the call in the 30 year political civil war with the Republicans. He understands that they have become dangerously radical and that it's time to break their hold on power. He knows this territory.

In that sense, I confess I'm surprised that liberals aren't taking more heart in the fact that John Kerry is a card carrying fighting Massachusetts liberal. We should be thrilled that somebody as liberal as Kerry has got a chance to be president. Because let's not kid ourselves, anybody more liberal than John Kerry is unelectable. The last non-southerner was JFK (with the younger JFK sitting on the left):




He's not a crook, he's not lazy, he's not stupid. He's very accomplished, he's highly experienced and he's got good instincts. But, I'm convinced that the most important character traits in a successful President at this point in history are resiliance and cunning; even if we win the election, politics are going to remain a bloodsport. The Republicans aren't going to fade away. This battle is ongoing and we must have someone who can withstand a punch and come back. It is going to be very, very difficult to govern. I think Kerry is running not because he's "electable," but because he's one of the few Democrats of his generation who has spent his life preparing to govern in the face of a radical political opposition. The job is not for the fainthearted.

But, even if you don't believe that any of that is tue, I think it is safe to say that the Democratic nominee for president is always going to be running to one degree or another:

To protect and defend the citizens of the United States.

To preserve the separation of church and state

To safeguard the right to choose.

To provide a decent safety net

To encourage progressive taxation

To protect the environment

To advance civil liberties and civil rights

To govern transparently

To provide opportunity

To promote equality

To advance progress

To preserve the American way of Life


These are good reasons to feel ok about voting for John Kerry. The other side has very different ideas.


Update:

Upon reflection I think I failed to make clear the fact that I believe that right now the Democrats are essentially the conservative party, which means as great an emphasis on preservation as progress. This comes as a result of the two party system that places us in contrast to the radical Republican paarty which seeks to overturn the New Deal and dissolve the international order of the last 50 years. By necessity, our candidates are not going to be able to run on as progressive a platform as many of us might wish. One has to take into consideration the nature of the opposition and the character of the body politic when framing a case.

Kerry is not a reformer as Dean was perceived to be, nor is he a champion of a particular constituency as Gephardt was. But, perhaps at a time like this it is more helpful to judge the candidate by the quality of his enemies than his friends. His career has been about fighting bad guys, from Vietnam to Dick Nixon to BCCI.

In light of that, I believe Kerry is running for the simple reason that this time and place requires somebody who has the experience and character to keep the country secure while fighting back a rabid political opposition at home and a series of difficult threats overseas. His life has uniquely prepared him for this political moment.


For a similar perspective read Soldier For Peace in todays Salon.



digby 4/12/2004 10:19:00 PM |

 
Sr. Comedy Correspondent

Gawd, how I hate pretentious, boring people telling me what's funny and what isn't:

To be honest, I was never a huge fan of Stewart's humor, which he custom-crafts for a mostly college-age audience. "The Daily Show"'s intention of showing clips from the news in order to mock the conventional coverage of the news and get to the bottom of what's really going on in the world always seemed to me too dependent on the thing it derided--the comic equivalent of covering an old song. Stewart's deflate-the-talking-heads shtick consists too much of sarcastic jibes at the Pompous or Deceitful Public Figure, at the Underlying Reality of Self-Interest; it's more like throwing fruit than making jokes.

[...]

Stewart can be funny when he's not playing his new role as comique engage, though it's strange that he can't mimic or do accents--he's the only American comic I've ever heard who can't do a British accent. My Korean grocer can do a British accent. Most peculiar is that he keeps using the identical outrageous-silly voice Johnny Carson patented decades ago. Maybe someone should give him a nudge. But the really discouraging thing is that nowadays, Stewart seems to consider it more important to be a good citizen than a funny fellow. According to the newspapers, a substantial number of younger viewers actually get their news from "The Daily Show." So for some time now, Stewart doesn't just want to skewer the conventional news and the mendacious politicians. He wants to clarify the news, and to educate his audience.

Yeah, well, it's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.

The result is that Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He's not just funny about politics, you see, he's savvy about the way the system works, and he's going to help us through the maze. In Washington, "you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam." Stop, you're killing me.

Methinks that journalist, TV critic and all around pompous ass Lee Siegel just doesn't get the joke. But that's not surprising. He is, after all, the punch line.



digby 4/12/2004 08:55:00 AM |

 
Damn Right

I said it before and I'll say it again, Howard Dean is the guy to make the case against Nader. He understands that you can't take anything for granted. He's got my gratitude.






digby 4/12/2004 12:33:00 AM |

Sunday, April 11, 2004

 
Brain Damage

Q Mr. President, could you tell us, did you see the presidential -- the President's Daily Brief from August of '01 as a warning --

THE PRESIDENT: Did I see it? Of course I saw it; I asked for it.

Q No, no, I'm sorry -- did you see it as a warning of hijackers? And how did you respond to that?

THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?

As you might recall, there was some specific threats for overseas that we reacted to. And as the President, I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing, I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into. But that PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America -- well, we knew that.

Yes, Dave.

Q Just to follow up on that, Mr. President. There was, in that PDB, specific information about activity that may speak to a larger battle plan, even if it wasn't specific. So I wonder if you could say what specifically was done, and do you think your administration should have done anything more?

THE PRESIDENT: David, look, let me just say it again: Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack. I would have done everything I can. My job is to protect the American people. And I asked the intelligence agency to analyze the data to tell me whether or not we faced a threat internally, like they thought we had faced a threat in other parts of the world. That's what the PDB request was. And had there been actionable intelligence, we would have moved on it.

I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to in the PDB, but if you're referring to the fact that the FBI was investigating things, that's great, that's what we expect the FBI to do.

Q Wasn't that current threat information? That wasn't historical, that was ongoing.

THE PRESIDENT: Right, and had they found something, they would have reported it to me. That's -- we were doing precisely what the American people expects us to do: run down every lead, look at every scintilla of intelligence, and follow up on it. But there was -- again, I can't say it as plainly as this: Had I known, we would have acted. Of course we would have acted. Any administration would have acted. The previous administration would have acted. That's our job.

Q Are you satisfied, though, that each agency was doing everything it should have been doing?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that's what the 9/11 Commission should look into, and I hope it does. It's an important part of the assignment of the 9/11 Commission. And I look forward to their recommendations, a full analysis of what took place. I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America -- at a time and a place, an attack. Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what. And you might recall the hijacking that was referred to in the PDB. It was not a hijacking of an airplane to fly into a building, it was hijacking of airplanes in order to free somebody that was being held as a prisoner in the United States.

"I am very aware of the cameras," [Bush] recalled later. "I'm trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to. I'm sitting in the midst of a classroom with little kids, listening to a children's story and I realise I'm the Commander in Chief and the country has just come under attack."


Update: Skippy has some questions for the Teacher's Aid In Chief.






digby 4/11/2004 06:22:00 PM |

 
What, Charles Manson Turned Them Down?

Tim at The Road To Surfdom notes that the good news is they don't seem likely to appoint Paul Wolfowitz as Ambassador to Iraq. The bad news is that the new name being floated is a war criminal:

In Washington, two U.S. officials said John Negroponte, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is expected to be the first U.S. ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq.

One of the officials said Negroponte, a favorite of Secretary of State Colin Powell, (wtf?) has been asked whether he would take the job. But no imminent announcement is expected from the White House, because President Bush and his aides do not want to turn U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer into a lame duck.

If nominated and confirmed, Negroponte would oversee what is expected to be one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world. He has held numerous top posts before, including ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan administration's covert war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

That's certainly true. He has tons of experience with the kinds of "harsh measures" that the hawks now believe are going to be called for. What this article fails to mention is that:

...Negroponte -- ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 -- was doing his best to make sure that news of torture, disappearances and killings by the U.S.-trained Honduran military didn't make it back to Congress or the American people, where it might discourage funding for the covert wars.

More than $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer money flowed to the Honduran military during the 1980s. The country served as the primary U.S. base for waging its clandestine wars against communism -- specifically in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The CIA trained and financed a Honduran army unit known as Battalion 316, which kidnapped and tortured hundreds of people. Negroponte denied knowing of the human rights violations though the abuses were widely publicized in the Honduran press. A CIA document declassified in 1998 and made available by the nonprofit National Security Archive, acknowledged that the Honduran military had committed abuses which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned.

"The focus of my efforts were in shoring up Honduras's own defenses," Negroponte said in a 1999 CNN interview. "So we worked on building up their military, and building their self-confidence. ... We served as a sort of rear area, if you will, on a modest scale for the efforts in El Salvador." Some 75,000 Salvadorans died in the civil war in that country.

Just a cursory look at the record shows that Negropont is being much too "modest."

Negroponte supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnaped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte's participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government.

During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military and he claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post. When the Reagan administration came to power, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations.

Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras:

Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.

The Suns's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of numerous abuses but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensured that the embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story.

Is this the right man for the job, or what? Saddam would be proud to know that we were considering sending in a man who understands the unpleasant "necessities" required to lead Iraq --- torture, kidnapping and mass graves. If John Negropont becomes the ambassador, we will be making sure that Saddam's legacy lives on. And, I think we can safely put to bed any more protestations about freedom, democracy and "liberation."





digby 4/11/2004 04:33:00 PM |

 
Sending A Message

Several American and Iraqi officials now regard Bremer's move to close the newspaper as a profound miscalculation based on poor intelligence and inaccurate assumptions. Foremost among the errors, the officials said, was the lack of a military strategy to deal with Sadr if he chose to fight back, as he did.

[...]

as with the campaign against Sadr, the military plan to quell Fallujah appears to have been based on faulty assumptions. Instead of disgorging the insurgents, many residents rallied to support them by joining the fight against the Marines. People in other cities, including Shiites who used to regard Fallujah's residents as the hillbillies of Iraq, rushed to donate blood and money. Sunnis in Fallujah and elsewhere in central Iraq who had deemed Sadr a troublemaker began to laud him as a hero.

All of a sudden, Bremer had not just a two-front war on his hands, but one in which each side was drawing strength from the other.

Does anyone in this administration ever make a decision based upon sound intelligence and accurate assumptions? Do they even try to obtain them? And, they have never planned anything beyond the next morning or developed a fall back strategy in case something goes wrong.

The military began to assemble plans to go after Sadr, an initiative that was blessed by Bremer and the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz also favored taking action against Sadr, a senior military officer at the Pentagon said.

But the overall commander for the Middle East at the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid, was hesitant to move on Sadr out of concern that arresting or killing him would simply elevate his stature, the officer said. Moderate Shiite clerics also advised the occupation authority against an arrest.

Well, Abazaid is the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, speaks fluent Arabic and has an understanding of the people and the region. Thank goodness nobody listens to him. Wolfowitz is the guy with the great track record, after all:

When Bremer ordered the shutdown of al-Hawza, there was no intention to use force to apprehend Sadr or leaders of his militia, according to occupation authority officials familiar with the decision.

One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad. That area has been under the jurisdiction of multinational military divisions that had failed to move aggressively against the cleric's militia.

The newspaper closure was intended "to send another signal to Sadr, just like telling him about the arrest warrant," the official said. "In hindsight, it was a huge mistake. The best-case scenario was that he would ignore it, like the earlier threat, or that he would capitulate. The worst case was that he would lash back. But we weren't ready for that.

[...]

At the time, occupation authority officials figured that Sadr had between 3,000 and 6,000 militiamen, only 2,000 of whom were armed fighters -- a figure that turned out to be a vast underestimate. "We were relying on the most optimistic predictions possible," the official said.

Officials in Washington familiar with the deliberations of both the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they knew of no high-level meetings before the closure of Sadr's paper in which either group reviewed military plans girding for a possible violent backlash.

But the officials said that the decision to move against Sadr was fully supported by senior Bush administration officials. And while top officials may not have been familiar with military details, one senior administration official said that Washington had repeatedly advised Bremer and U.S. commanders in Iraq to ensure they were prepared for trouble if they went after Sadr.

"Every time we talked with Baghdad about taking any action against Sadr, we always talked about the need to have proper preparations in place to deal with a violent reaction," the official said.

Looks like Bremer's being cut loose. No wonder he looked like he'd ben hit between the eyes with a 2x4 this morning on Press the Meat.

Senor said the decision to move against Sadr in late March was prompted by "a real trend in the ramping-up of very inciteful, highly provocative rhetoric" from Sadr "that was directed at promoting violence against Americans during a very emotional time."

"We believe we had a responsibility to address it head-on," he said. "We had a concern that if he was left unchecked, Americans could wind up getting killed."

That certainly worked out well.

I think Americans have to give some serious thought to this entire concept of "sending a message." From abstinence education to "shock and awe" this method of governance almost seems designed to invoke the law of unintended consequences. Perhaps it's time to think about real policies based upon sound information and contingency plans.

The messages we are sending --- hubris, incompetence and ignorance --- are toxic. And it's going to get increasingly dangerous to you and me personally. Anti-Americanism isn't necessarily directed at "the American people" at this point. However, if we give this administration another term that is going to change. Right now, most people understand that the majority of Americans did not vote for this man. But, the rest of the world will hold us responsible if we elect him legitimately in spite of what we now know about him. That, after all, is the message that Democracy sends.





digby 4/11/2004 10:50:00 AM |

Saturday, April 10, 2004

 
PBDing His Pants

William Schneider on CNN just said that the memo is very damaging to the president. He said that basically the only thing they didn't know in advance was the date the attacks were to take place.

First Bush lost Fineman. Now he's lost Schneider.



digby 4/10/2004 03:39:00 PM |

 
Dream Team

Kevin at catch.com finds Instapundit sinking to a new low. Novak and Coulter must be so pleased.






digby 4/10/2004 03:10:00 PM |

 
A Madame Zoya Foreign Policy

Via Roger Ailes I found this remarkable example of total incoherence on the Right:

Fighting terrorism as well as rogue dictators requires a policy of pre-emption. During the 1930s, there should have been a pre-emptive strike on Nazi Germany. If Britain and France had the guts to do that, 60 million lives lost in World War II might have been spared. After World War II, when we held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, we should have told the Soviet Union that if it started making nuclear weapons we'd bomb its facilities. We would have avoided Soviet adventurism and trillions of dollars fighting a Cold War. Today, we should give axis-of-evil member North Korea notice to destroy its nuclear weapons or we'll do it for them.

Well, it would be nice if our intelligence services could find their way out of a paper bag and provide us with, you know, real information about threats before we go around blowing shit up, but why sweat the small stuff?

I do like this new crystal ball theory of history, though. Just think, if France and Britain had pre-emptively "struck" Germany they could have prevented WWII. If we had pre-emptively "struck" the Soviets we could have prevented the Cold War. And presumably if the British had pre-emptively invaded France they could have prevented the Napoleonic Wars, too. But, I have to suppose that by "strike" he means some kind of magical incantation that paralyzes the population, because otherwise he's talking about starting wars and that usually means that those who are "struck," strike back. Which also means that unless you are willing to nuke the population or occupy it with an iron hand indefinitely, a war is going to result when somebody strikes. He apparently thinks that's fine it's just best if we do the starting.

But, not to worry. I think he also believes that the world will be so impressed by our ability to accurately foretell who is and isn't a threat that they'll just take our word for it and capitulate before we are forced to get really ugly. America is omnipotent and the sooner everybody gets with the program the safer they'll all be. That's what our great success in Iraq is all about. And it's working beautifully.





digby 4/10/2004 01:13:00 PM |

 
Let Us Pray

Apparently, we should not be overly upset about the casualties in Iraq because there haven't been as many as in World War II.

One of Instapundit's readers says:

About 2,500 young men from the Allied nations died on June 6, 1944. 12,000 Americans died in three months' fighting for Okinawa. While some members of the press (Fox included) might consider themselves honoring the fallen by referring to 12 heroes as "heavy casualties," they in fact have done a disservice to the concept of sacrifice and a nation's endurance of it in war. Andrew Sullivan asked us to pray for the Marines in Fallujah; I think we ought to start a prayer with "Dear Lord, please lead members of the press to a doggoned history book. Or Google."

"Dear Lord, please lead Instapundit's readers to the chapter on WWII in which it says that Germany declared war on the US, overran most of Europe and invaded Russia and may they read the part where it shows the US was attacked by Japan. After that perhaps they could be led to Google to find out how many casualties were suffered over all in WWII in countries from one end of the globe to the other. May you then remind them that the war we fought then was one of survival, not one of choice based upon lies, bad information and optimistic scenarios --- and that the lesson of that war was that wars of aggression would never again be sanctioned by the civilized world. Until now.

Finally, Dear Lord, may you hand them each an apple and an orange and explain to them the difference. Amen."



digby 4/10/2004 11:54:00 AM |

 
Why Do You Hate Civilization So Much?

Thank goodness we finally have somebody dispassionately assessing the situation in Iraq and telling it like it is. You see, when David Brooks isn't scarfing up mini meals at Red Lobster, our intrepid war correspondent is bravely chatting to people who are "familiar with the region" and they fill him in on the real skinny in Iraq. It's a coupla opportunistic thugs and some ungrateful punks trying to take advantage of our goodness, that's all. Lucky for us our leaders are resolved and bold while being cool, bold and resolved:

Most important, leadership in the U.S. is for once cool and resolved. This week I spoke with leading Democrats and Republicans and found a virtual consensus. We're going to keep the June 30 handover deadline. We're going to raise troop levels if necessary. We're going to wait for the holy period to end and crush Sadr. As Joe Lieberman put it, a military offensive will alienate Iraqis, but "the greater risk is [Sadr] will grow into something malevolent." As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, "I've been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve."

Nonetheless, yesterday's defections from the Iraqi Governing Council show that populist pressure on the good guys is getting intense. Maybe it is time to pause, to let passions cool, to let the democrats marshal their forces. If people like Sistani are forced to declare war on the U.S., the gates of hell will open up.

Over the long run, though, the task is unavoidable. Sadr is an enemy of civilization. The terrorists are enemies of civilization. They must be defeated.

Nevah Give Up, Nevah Give In, nevah, nevah, nevah!

(Oh, sorry about that. I just got carried away with Field Marshall Brooks's gripping call to arms for a minute.)

So, Sadr is an enemy of civilization, now, not just the US. (Or have the two words become synonymous?) Jeez, you used to have to commit genocide or gas your own people or mastermind a huge terrorist act to be an enemy of civilization. Now all you have to do is incite a couple of days of violence in Iraq. If that's the new definition I have a feeling that the list of enemies of civilization is going to get mighty unwieldy.

These people are going to be liberated, goddamit, whether they like it or not! Civilization depends on it.

Update:

I'm aware that Sadr is a fundamentalist extremist in the mode of the Taliban. He is the last person anyone would want to see in power. But, it is not helpful to simplify this problem by saying that we are dealing with "thugs" or to unnecessarily inflate it to a clash of civilizations.

The problem in Iraq is political. We are witnessing the entirely predictable struggle for power that the US refused to admit would happen and for which they refused to prepare. Our bedfellows, from the likes of Chalabi on the one hand to Bahr Ul Iloom on the other, illustrate that we had no principles in choosing the new leaders of Iraq and the result is that the hothead we marginalized is making use of the anti-Americanism that predictably resulted from a badly run occupation. Kill Sadr tomorrow and he'll be replaced by somebody just like him. Meanwhile the IGC is coming apart at the seams.

This isn't a clash of civilizations. It's the beginning of another civil war that the US finds itself in the middle of because of a feckless foreign policy. I'm beginning to think that the chickenhawks are simply reliving their youth. Once again they are sitting comfortably at home, cheering from the sidelines, willfully misinterpreting the facts while others die for the cause they support. These are the good old days.


digby 4/10/2004 02:38:00 AM |

 
A Beautiful Vacant Mind

President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.

The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 – a month before the Sept. 11 attacks – said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.


[...]

The sources said the presidential memo included a series of bullet items that brought Bush through a history of mostly uncorroborated intelligence that cited al-Qaida's interest in hijacking planes to win the release of Islamic extremists who had been arrested in 1998 and 1999 as well as the travelings of suspected al-Qaida operatives, include some U.S. citizens, in and out of the United States. It suggested al-Qaida might have a support system in place on U.S. soil, the sources said.

The document also included FBI analytical judgments that some al-Qaida activities were consistent with preparation for airline hijackings or other types of attacks, some members of the commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said earlier this week.

The second-to-last bullet told the president that there were numerous – at least 70 – terror-related investigations under way by the FBI in 2001 involving matters or people on U.S. soil, the sources said.

And the final bullet told the president of a recent intelligence report indicating al-Qaida operatives were trying to get inside the United States to carry out an attack with explosives, the sources said. There was no specifics about the timing or target, the sources said.

This finally explains why just 5 weeks later, one day after the attacks, Bush dragged Richard Clarke into a room and insisted he investigate Iraq's possible involvement. You wouldn't have wanted him to go off half cocked and blame the wrong guy...



digby 4/10/2004 01:50:00 AM |

Friday, April 09, 2004

 
Number One With A Bullet

If anyone still doubts that politics has left the realm of reality and entered the world of show business, I would suggest that they tune into "Hardball" where television critic Tom Shales is critiquing Condi Rice's "performance" yesterday. He rated the hearings for drama and suspense and reviewed the various exchanges between the commissioners and Condi as dramatic scenes and sequences.

Personally, I didn't think there was enough sex and violence in that show. Thankfully there was the gory Iraq footage of bloodied marines and iraqi civilians later in the day to sate my bloodlust. It's almost as good as Survivor. And that footage of the Japanese hostages is just super. "Will they be rescued or will the bad guys burn them alive?" Stay tuned....

As for sex, I'm just glad that President Clinton testified in secret immediately after Condi, so we can assume that some press ho will report a breathless account of his "testimony" at some point (they always do.) All I can say is those commissioners emerged later in the day looking downright limp with satisfaction:

HAMILTON: Well, it was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. And I think every commissioner would agree with that. He was exceedingly generous with his time, very candid in his discussions of even the most delicate kinds of relationships ... I think the commissioners were all favorably impressed, both Republican and Democrat, and very appreciative of the amount of time that he gave to us.

KEAN: And he was just totally frank -- totally frank, totally honest, and forthcoming... he said, "I'll stay just as long as you all want me to."

Oooh La La. A 240 minute man.

I can hardly wait for Ashcroft's testimony next week. Maybe he'll share some of the naughty bits about the porn investigations and sing a chorus or two of "Let The Ego Soar."

I love Show Biz.



digby 4/09/2004 04:58:00 PM |

 
Follow The Money

As if there wasn't enough trouble already, Sean-Paul has an interesting item this morning about the shaky state of Iraq's finances:

Ahead of a deadline for the transfer of power, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s reporting of Iraqi finances falls short of international standards of accounting and transparency, said a report by the Open Society Institute’s Iraq Revenue Watch project. The report, Opening the Books: Transparent Budgeting for Iraq, urges the CPA and the Iraqi Governing Council to make further improvements in accordance with these standards before a new Iraqi government is elected in 2005.

[...]

Iraq’s 2004 budget, produced by the CPA and Iraq’s Ministries of Finance and Planning, is the country’s first full-year financial plan since Saddam Hussein’s removal. However, it lacks key information about state-owned enterprises, financing for sub-national governments, and contingencies that pose significant risks to Iraq’s public purse. There is no contingency planning for what Iraq will do if oil prices fall or exports are disrupted, if hostilities resume, or foreign aid fails to materialize

Well, convicted felon Ahmad Chalabi's crony Kamil Mubdir al-Kaylani is the minister of finance and his nephew, Ali'Alawi, is the Minister of Trade, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

However, since Ken Lay was unavailable, the CPA installed right wing nut and GOP hack David M. Nummy as the senior advisor to the treasury so it can be asumed that all of the safeguards and transparency we have come to expect from the Bush administration are being employed in the new Iraqi economy. There's nothing to worry about.






digby 4/09/2004 08:39:00 AM |

 
Fool Me Once...

Atrios points out that it's a little bit cheeky of some people to preface their criticisms of the current situation in Iraq with "as a war supporter" since that designation automatically makes their judgment suspect:

One should not have to have been "pro-war" to be a critic of what's going on. I'm tired of people prefacing their criticisms with phrases like "as someone who supported this war..." Well, you were wrong. Why should we listen to you now?

Plenty of us knew that this neocon claque was going to screw this thing up and said so at the time. Suddenly realizing that Bush is incompetent and that his advisors are living in a dream world is a year late and 200 billion dollars short.



digby 4/09/2004 07:39:00 AM |

 
Who Us?

Here's an interesting tid bit from my left brain

One of Rice's answers today caught my attention. She was excusing why the Bush administration hadn't acted on what she considered a "vague" threat:

...when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur under what circumstances I can tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think about what you could do, for instance, to harden cockpits. That would have made a difference. We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months that we had a threat spike. [emphasis added]]

[...]

After 9/11, it took the airlines fewer than three months to strengthen the cockpits by adding bars to the doors and other measures. In fact, it took them one month. Airlines were told to do something to secure cockpit doors in early October 2001 and the Transportation Secretary announced on November 9 that all airlines had completed this task.

Granted, it's unlikely that they would have undertaken this job based upon vague threats, but it certainly was possible to achieve it if they had. And, today we found out that Norm Mineta didn't even know there was a threat spike.

I realize that the airline industry was dragged into fixing those doors kicking and screaming and short of catastrophe they were unwilling to budge. Regardless, it's a bit rich that Condi thinks that previous administrations should have done this, but not hers. Sadly for all of us, 9/11 happened on her watch, not theirs, and she was the one getting the highjacking warnings and had the head of CIA and her counterterorism chief running around screaming bloody murder.

Being a wholly owned subsidiary of US Industry made the Bush administration more able to accomplish this task than the previous one. Like Nixon and China, Bush should have been the guy to force the industry to bite the bullet. And it certainly makes you wonder why Condi and Company still haven't done anything about this:

Even though small commercial aircraft are more likely to be lost in a shoulder-fired missile attack, two of the jet aircraft most familiar to American travelers have proven surprisingly vulnerable: Of the five Boeing 727s and 737s that have been hit by shoulder-launched missiles, three have been shot down, and in one of them 130 people died just after takeoff in Angola.

Despite the demonstrated risk that these missiles pose, no meaningful changes have been made to commercial aircraft design or flight operations to reduce it. While the president and other officials travel on aircraft equipped with countermeasures systems that protect them against a missile attack, most Americans do not. "The threats are real and the countermeasures exist," a retired government anti-terrorism expert told Salon, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "Some of us are perplexed as to why a greater sense of urgency hasn't been demonstrated in securing our airspace."

digby 4/09/2004 12:52:00 AM |

Thursday, April 08, 2004

 
MIA

This has been bugging the hell out of me as well. It's one thing for Kerry to allow Bush to swing in the wind on the pre-9/11 stuff. Let the widows and the whistleblowers take that on. The less partisanship the better. But, Iraq is something else entirely.

Iraq is a crisis and an ongoing problem and it isn't enough for it to be seen blowing up on television. Kerry has got to convince people that Bush is the problem and that he can fix it. Instead, he's acting clueless and disengaged.

I sincerely hope that they are not planning to re-run the 2002 midterm campaign because we will lose again. A tie goes to the codpiece. You can't ignore national security. Not only is it a more glamorous subject for the news media to cover, it is also a clearer demonstration of presidential leadership. With a war going on, a presidential candidate simply has to meet it head on or look like a sissy even if the other guy is self-destructing.

The Salon article linked above says:

A Kerry spokesman told Salon on Thursday that it's incumbent on Bush -- not Kerry -- to address the crisis in Iraq. "What has the president said about this?" the Kerry spokesman asked. "He needs to explain what his policy is, what his plan is to address what's going on right now. But he's been down on his ranch in Crawford. The spotlight isn't on John Kerry. The spotlight needs to be on Bush. He's the president, and he's the person who has carved out these policies."

Bullshit. The spotlight may "need" to be on Bush, but Americans want to know what the alternative thinks is the problem and what he thinks needs to be done. This is a total pussy response and it is simply not good enough. And it isn't just the campaign flack. Check out Kerry himself on Judy Woodruff yesterday, and note how she used his dramatic line from his congressional testimony against him. It was a terrible moment:

WOODRUFF: ...Well, as we know, the would-be presumed Democratic nominee for president, Senator John Kerry, has often criticized the Bush administration for what he says is a unilateral approach in Iraq. I spoke with Senator Kerry just a little while ago and I started by asking for his reaction to Bush advisers who say they are already doing much of what Kerry advocates and that his criticism amounts to what they call phony politics.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KERRY: They're doing it in such a frankly, inept way, Judy, that they're not really inviting anybody sufficiently to the table. People don't want to go to work for Paul Bremer and the provisional authority. What you need to do is have a transfer of authority for the reconstruction and for the transformation of the government to a legitimate international entity. Every day that goes by that this administration has refused to do it has complicated the doing of it. They, in fact, have made it much harder to accomplish what could have been accomplished and should have been accomplished a long time ago. I refuse to accept that logic from them, and I laid out this plan months ago. They're trying to do it through the backdoor, through almost through the keyhole rather than openly coming forward and acknowledging they need help.

WOODRUFF: So Senator...

KERRY: The Arab countries have an interest...

WOODRUFF: What exactly right now would you do differently?

KERRY: Right now, what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I'm not the president, and I didn't create this mess so I don't want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven't made. The president needs to step up and acknowledge that there are difficulties and that the world needs to be involved and they need to reverse their policy that countries that were not involved in supporting us are not going to be part of the reconstruction.

I mean, that's a terrible message to send to countries. They need to go to the world and say we're not going to have an American authority that is -- creating this new government. We're going to have an international authority that will help develop the new government and absent a legitimate effort to globalize this presence, they're going to continue to have the very problems they have today.

This was predictable, and there are many of us who have said that this is exactly the kind of thing that will happen absent a legitimate kind of international presence.

WOODRUFF: Senator, you said it was a mistake, not your mistake, but you called it a mistake and also said you wouldn't cut and run. You've acknowledged there may need to be more troops. If there were a President Kerry, he might have to send in more troops. I want to ask you the question you asked during the Vietnam war. How do you ask a man and today that would be a man or a woman, to be the last to die for a mistake?

KERRY: Well, the mistake that I'm talking about, Judy, is not the effort to fight and have -- not the effort to have a stable Iraq. The mistake is in the way that they are going about it. So I would change the way you're going about it. I mean again and again, I have said, I laid out with great specificity months ago the steps that they should have taken, and I believe that those people who have been in touch with people in the international community know there is a different and better way to put together an effort that could legitimize a government in Iraq. If we insist on doing this through our provisional government authority, if we insist on being totally in control the way we are today, we're going to having an impossible time legitimately bringing people to the table.

Just shoot me now. This is going to be a long campaign.

Why can't he say, "I'm not sure what George W. Bush could do to help the situation other than delay the June 30th date until after the election so that another president can be elected to replace him. Because the problem, Judy, is that nobody in the world believes a thing George W. Bush says anymore and that includes the Iraqis.

If I were in office, we wouldn't be in the mess because I would never make it a policy to unnecessarily alienate the entire world. Nor would I trust those who only feed me optimistic scenarios. I would never allow our military to operate at anything less than the levels that are needed to achieve the mission, and I would listen to the military experts, not unqualified ideologues like Newt Gingrich, when making those decisions.

I'm afraid, Judy, that George W. Bush has gotten himself into a mess that he cannot resolve because of his previous actions. I trust our military to hang on and do the fine work that they always do. They will do what is necessary to ensure that the country is secure in the short term. But this crisis untimately requires a political solution and George W. Bush has run out of political options. A new president and a fresh start is what's required to fix this problem. Only then can rebuild the trust of our allies and go back to the drawing board with all the parties and set a proper course for a free and democratic Iraq."

I'm sure he and others can come up with better langauge. But, the message is that the problem is George W. Bush. When he is replaced a whole range of options become available that are now foreclosed because of the world's mistrust of his intelligence, his motives, his integrity and his ability.

Or he could ignore it and keep talking about the budget deficit while CNN is showing marines getting picked off by the dozens, live and in color. That looks to me like the campaign equivalent of Junior reading that story about the goat to the second graders while the WTC was collapsing. It doesn't show leadership. And that's the theme of this election.





digby 4/08/2004 10:41:00 PM |

 
Looking For Trouble

According to this article, "Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army militia are filled with young volunteers eager to fight the US-led occupation forces."

Outside, hundreds of young men chanting "Allahu Akbar," or God is the Greatest, listened to another cleric shouting vows to fight the occupation from the rooftop.

A Mehdi Army spokesman, Amer al-Husseini, said the militia had orders to stay calm, but warned that "after they bombarded our headquarters and prayer room with Apache helicopters and tanks, we are ready to resume combat until the last drop of our blood."

"We will never let anyone arrest our leader Moqtada Sadr," he added, alluding a coalition arrest warrant for the firebrand in connection with the murder of a rival cleric after Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime was ousted last April.

Following several days of clashes with the US-led occupation forces across the country during which the Mehdi Army seized police stations and government offices, the coalition has vowed to destroy the militia.

"We will attack to destroy the Mehdi Army. Our offensive operations will be deliberate, they will be precise, and they will be powerful and they will succeed," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.

Sadr, who is only in his early 30s and whose father and great-uncle were killed by Saddam's regime, formed the Mehdi Army last summer after the US-led military coalition invaded Iraq (news - web sites).

[...]

A steady flow of new volunteers have been presenting themselves to mosques and Sadr offices in defiance of the coalition's ban on militias.

Its ranks are largely composed of desperate and unemployed young men from poor Shiite areas -- notably Baghdad's teeming Sadr City which switched its name from Saddam City after the fall of the deposed regime to honor the firebrand's slain father.

Many are also from southern Shiite cities which suffered brutal repression at the hands of Saddam's Sunni Muslim-dominated regime.

The militiamen often wear black pants and shirts, as well as green headbands symbolizing Islam. They are fiercely attached to Sadr's guidance and his family's lineage of revered clerics.

Their recent fierce battles with the coalition revealed they mostly have access to light weapons, including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns.

"We have light weapons, but our most lethal weapon is our faith in God. Nothing can defeat God's will," said one militiaman, Ali Hussein.

"We started new training last week. But we don't really need to train the new recruits. Saddam had built a militarized society over decades. So we were trained by the best killer," he said.

Let's hope that this does not become a fraternity of aimless young men because there are a huge number of them in Iraq. The demographics of Iraq are not heartening:

Iraq is a young country: Sixty-six percent of Iraqis 15 and up are under age 35, compared with 36 percent of Americans age 15 and up.

digby 4/08/2004 03:14:00 PM |

 
Drip, Drip Drip

After today's revelation that Condi and Andy didn't follow up with the FBI after the July "domestic threat" meeting, next week's testimony by Louis Freeh, Thomas Pickard and John Ashcroft should be much more interesting. The commission obviously has homed in on a serious weakness:

Commission officials said their evidence showed that Mr. Ashcroft had taken little interest in counterterrorism before Sept. 11 and, days before the attacks, had rejected pleas from senior F.B.I. officials for more money for counterterrorism even as intelligence agencies warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attack.

They said the commission may make public a series of internal memorandums written by Thomas J. Pickard, who was the F.B.I. acting director in the summer of 2001, criticizing what he perceived to be Mr. Ashcroft's disinterest in counterterrorism. Mr. Pickard, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, is also expected to testify next week.

But, of course, there were those structural problems, so nothing could have been done.


Important Correction: Fixed controversial typo.


digby 4/08/2004 09:43:00 AM |

 
Swatting That Bug In His Ear

I don't know if anyone got this subtle point in Condi's testimony, but it appears that there were structural impediments in the US government that meant that no one could have prevented 9/11. She did everything possible, but the structural problems meant nothing could be done. Because of the structural problems. If they had known that the terrorists were going to attack Washington and new York, they would have moved heaven and earth to stop them. But, there were these structural problems. So there was nothing they could do.

Oh and also, the August PDB was not a "warning" it was an "historical assessment." So, even though this "historical assessment" entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" was undertaken during the very time that George Tenet was running through the White House with his hair on fire about an impending terrorist attack, there was no reason to be alarmed. The president wanted to stop swatting flies, so they put this little bug in his ear. It was no big deal.

If only Richard Clarke had tried to "buck her up" before his September 4th memo (in which he raised the spectre of hundreds of dead Americans) about how the bureaucracy would fight implementing the terrorism policy. Maybe then she would have been more aware of how to deal with the national security bureaucracy. But then, that whole "shaking the trees" thing is bs, so probably not.

Besides, the Clinton administration should have fixed the structural problems and locked up the cockpit doors long before the Bush administration came into office. They couldn't possibly have done anything about all that in only 233 days. They had tax cuts and missile defense to take care of.

Update: For those who didn't know previously about the title of the August 6th memo, here's a copy of the article in the Washington Post from Common Dreams, dated May 18, 2002.


digby 4/08/2004 09:00:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

 
Be All That You Can Be

Read this fascinating combat account by a female American soldier in Iraq this week The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit

I can’t even grasp that we lived through it. I don’t think it’s hit me yet.

What makes it worse was that we kept trying to get reinforcements and air cover and evac, and eventually we had to do it ourselves. We called up around 1500 because it became apparent that we weren’t going to get out, requesting air cover. We thought it would be over by 1700. By then, though, we realized something else was going on---darkness falls at seven. We heard that the whole province was under control, and that Sadr’s representatives had offered a cease fire while they negotiated. No other government building in the province was not under his control. Our little force, outmanned and outgunned, held him off for better than twenty hours, and then slipped out under his nose. He wanted to keep us there, be his bargaining chips while he tightened his fist around the province. And that fucking governor went along with it. We eventually found out the governor was contacting the command and telling them, no, no Evac behind our backs. He wanted US Marines dropped off and the civilians put in the helicopters while they secured his villa and offices. His own people were running around trying to arrange Evac, and kept counter-manding him. Then he’d go on the air and countermand them. I kept overhearing conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear.

I can’t describe what it’s like. You’re wearing twenty pounds of gear in helmet and vest, and the sound the bombs make screeching in seems not so much audible as it sensory. You feel it first. You know what sound a bullet makes going through the air? SWWWWWiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhh. It seems to burrow through the air with an odd slowness, as if it were greasy and that makes it slip through the air. If I were 11 Bravo, I’d have earned my combat infantrymen’s badge, except of course the fact that I’m a woman means I don’t get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn’t matter if you do the job, if you’re a woman----you’re not supposed to do it, so you don’t get acknowledgement if you do.

We didn’t sleep last night. The cease fire lasted seven hours. The attack resumed at one AM with RPGs and machine guns opening up on us from across the other bank of the river. We kept calling to Higher for Air Support, for Evac, for reinforcements. They’d say, “Sure, they’re on their way…” Twenty minutes later, we’d find out--not be told---that in fact they weren’t. This happened about eight times. During the time they weren’t reinforcing us, the enemy mined the bridge that’s the sole way out of there with IEDs. Then Higher ordered us to Evac our way across that bridge. It was explained to them over and over that the bridge was mined. They’d listen, then issue the order again.

This must be that hi-tech third wave electronic battlefield that Rummy and Newtie are so proud of. I didn't know it was faith-based, too.

Read the whole thing. It'll blow your mind.



digby 4/07/2004 10:30:00 PM |

 
Another Insider Comes Forward

In tonight's Salon, Sidney Blumenthal reveals yet another national security staffer, Flynt Leverett, who quit the Bush administration in disgust --- this time over the feckless middle east peace process. It is clear that Condi Rice is, quite simply, incompetent. But, Blumenthal doesn't lay it all on her:

The story of the Middle East debacle, like that of the pre-9/11 terrorism fiasco, reveals the inner workings of Bush's White House: The president, aggressive and manipulated, ignorant of his own policies and their consequences, negligent; the secretary of state, prideful, a man of misplaced gratitude, constantly in retreat; the vice president as Richelieu, secretive, conniving, at the head of a neoconservative cabal, the power behind the throne; the national security advisor, seemingly open and even vulnerable, posing as the honest broker, but deceitful and derelict, an underhanded lightweight.

Sounds right to me.

More here: U.S. Terrorism Policy Spawns Steady Staff Exodus







digby 4/07/2004 09:28:00 PM |

 
A Good First Step

Who could have ever predicted that members of the Shi'a majority would rebel like this? They hated Saddam and would surely be grateful that the US had liberated them. Yet, there were some little clues. Even during the exciting early days of the liberation, days when George W. Bush was so proud of his accomplishment --- "I love the stories about people saying, 'Isn't it wonderful to be able to express our religion, the Shia religion, on a pilgrimage...' --- there were some signs of trouble:

KARBALA, April 23, 2003 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Huge crowds of ecstatic Shiites surging through the holy city of Karbala on Wednesday, April 23, chanted slogans against a U.S.-imposed government in the second day of such protests coinciding with a major pilgrimage.

"No to an American government, no to Chalabi," the Shiites shouted, referring to Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-U.S. leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who has returned to Iraq after decades of exile with eyes on power.

It would appear that our "enemies" have been plotting against us for some time. And, to this day, Chalabi sticks in the Shiites' craw. His seat in the governing council is one of the seats allocated to the Shiite majority:

The composition of the Governing Council may reflect the Shia majority status for the first time ever in Iraq, but for some it does not reflect the representation. "There is an attempt to distort the truth about the Shia in order to deprive them of their rightful role," says Sheikh Qais Al-Khazali, who runs an office for the Al-Sadr movement in Sadr City. "The Americans are not giving a chance to the true representatives of the Shia. Instead they bring people who claim to represent the Shia, like Ahmed Chalabi. He‘s a crook who‘s stolen from the bank in Jordan."

Josh Marshall reminds us today that Ahmad's nephew Salem is in charge of setting up the war crimes tribunal. And, Ahmad has another nephew, Ali 'Alawi, who is the new Minister of Trade. And, then there's Kamil Mubdir al-Kaylani, the Minister of Finance and Banking who's a pal of Chalabi and was installed at his urging. No doubt there are more examples of Chalabi's cronyism.

And the fact that the interloper Chalabi takes up one of the 13 Shi'a slots on the Governing Council is a real problem. Via Susan at Suburban Guerilla, I found this post from Riverbend, inside iraq, in which she points out that the marginalizing of Sadr seemed a little bit capricious, considering who else the CPR was willing to deal with:

[Sadr was]just as willing to ingratiate himself to Bremer as Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom. The only difference is that he wasn't given the opportunity, so now he's a revolutionary. Apparently, someone didn't give Bremer the memo about how when you pander to one extremist, you have to pander to them all. Hearing Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom claim that Al-Sadr is a threat to security and stability brings about visions of the teapot and the kettle.

But, you see, we had to keep Ahmad happy and Ahmad is not well liked by the Sadr faction.

I don't know what the hell to do about the mess we are in in Iraq. It's truly beyond my ken. But, I can think of one thing that might make an immediate difference.

Get rid of that parasite Ahmad Chalabi and his band of cronies right this minute. Do it before it becomes a demand. Do it as a gesture of solidarity with all these ordinary Iraqis who see this opportunist for the scam artist he really is. It's a first step.



digby 4/07/2004 03:35:00 PM |

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

 
The Last Frontier

Paul Waldman has an interesting article in The Gadflyer on faithbased missile defense.

But this administration, the entire Republican Party, and healthy numbers of Democrats are still gripped by the idea that we can erect a missile defense "shield," a big dome sitting atop the United States that keeps us safe from all who would do us harm. The Bush administration has requested an increase of 20% in the missile defense budget for next year, to over $10 billion. The eventual cost of missile defense is hard to predict, but given that Bush wants to spend over $50 billion in the next five years alone, it's reasonable to conclude that the total cost of the program from this point forward will easily exceed $100 billion and perhaps $200 billion. Although it's difficult to precisely calculate what we've spent since the 1980s, reasonable estimates climb toward $100 billion, which has bought us…well, nothing.

It seems inexplicable that these people would continue with this quixotic obsession year after year knowing that it will not work. Except as a form of welfare for engineers, it's hard to understand.

Unless it's really about R&D for space-based weapons. Then it makes a little more sense.

This is another little program in the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Third Wave crapola that Rummy and the Wohlstetter crowd have been obsessing about for years (and which has shown such spectacular success here on planet earth.)

Rumsfeld personally has a vested belief in weaponized space and the National Missile Defense system, having headed the commission that in 1999 helped to persuade the Clinton Administration to push ahead with missile defense. His staff's long-range projections envision threats not from Europe, where the Army is heavily positioned, but from Asia—possible conflicts in which Navy missiles and Air Force precision bombs would be the preferred assets.

This fantasy of a "shield" is phony. As former arms control negotiator Jonathan Dean and Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute wrote back in 2001:

The rushed deployment of a costly and almost certainly unworkable national missile defense system makes no sense. But it does make sense if the underlying motive is to use the missile defense issue as grounds for moving to the weaponization of space and ultimately to its domination.

Repeated UN resolutions calling for the prevention of space weaponization have been nearly unanimous and without any no votes. Recognizing this fact, the United States, backed by only two small client states, has dared only to abstain. The community of nations will not tolerate one country's dominance of a weaponized space. Political and ultimately military challenges will certainly be mounted to contest U.S. dominance.

Not only is this very bad for our security, it contradicts our identity as a nation. Our country was founded in response to the actions of an over-reaching, hegemonic empire. In placing weapons over everyone on the planet, the United States is in peril of over-reaching itself.

Remember. These people are always wrong about everything. They are Austin Powers, not James Bond. Gawd help us.



digby 4/06/2004 09:36:00 PM |

 
Pure Class

President Bush has a penchant for dishing out good-natured insults, and usually the victim laughs along. But Sammie Briery didn't seem much amused when Bush fired one at her Tuesday.

Bush was wrapping up a town hall-style appearance at South Arkansas Community College when he let the jest fly. It was a mother joke, a blonde joke and an insult all in one.

"You and my mother go to the same hair-dye person," Bush said to Briery, whose blondish bob bore little resemblance to Barbara Bush's shock of white hair.

The audience in the gymnasium laughed, and Briery smiled, but replied firmly: "President Bush, I'm a natural blonde."

"Oh, yes," Bush agreed.

"I'm just a natural blonde," she repeated.

"I couldn't help myself, sorry," Bush shrugged.

With that, Bush moved quickly to end the session. He turned to Bob Watson, superintendent of the El Dorado Public Schools who had opened the meeting by inadvertently insulting Bush.

"Governor excuse me, President," Watson said.

Bush muttered, "How quickly they forget."

When Watson offered to shake Bush's hand, the president shot back: "Just don't hug me."

Whaddaya think? Prescription drugs?

Update:

Commenter Evan writes:

This story comes on top of the "who are you talking to?" business, where he got snippy with a reporter who called him "Sir" instead of "Mr. President".

And then there's the one Atrios posted, about how cutlery wasn't allowed at his fundraising luncheon because the sound might interrupt his speech.

And a couple of weeks ago, there was that business about paving a footpath at a park he was visiting because the President's feet aren't supposed to touch dirt.

At this point, would it actuallly *surprise* anybody if he started wearing epaulets and sleeping in an oxygen tent?

Don't forget the codpiece.






digby 4/06/2004 05:54:00 PM |

 
The Enemy

I have noticed a new proclivity among the press to call the Iraqi insurgency "the enemy." No doubt the military sees them as such since they are exchanging gunfire. And, perhaps the CPA and the US government see see them as "the enemy" too. It's strange, though. I thought "the enemy" was Saddam Hussein and his Sunni "bitter enders." But, the pictures I saw of the 4 corpses being defiled in Fallujah showed that many of the perpetrators were children. Are they bitter enders, too? Are they "the enemy?"

Now we are calling Sadr and his militia "the enemy," too. Fred Barnes is saying on Fox that the military has to "take out" the bad guys in Fallujah and Ramadi as well as "take out" Sadr and his followers before the June 30 takeover. Presumably, "taking out" means things like this:

U.S. warplanes firing rockets razed four houses in Fallujah late Tuesday, witnesses said. A doctor said 26 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed and 30 injured in the air-strike. The rockets destroyed the houses in two neighborhoods in the city after nightfall, the witnesses said.

And this:

Coalition troops opened fire on thousands of supporters of Shiite Muslim radical leader Moqtada Sadr headed towards the headquarters of the Spanish-led Plus Ultra Brigade on the outskirts of this Shiite holy city, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

And this:

Italian troops clashed with Shi'ite militiamen in the southern Iraq town of Nassiriya today in gunfights that killed around 15 Iraqis and wounded 12 Italians, the Italian military and coalition sources said.

[...]

The clashes began shortly after (0530 hrs IST) when members of a militia loyal to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fired on Italian forces as they began operations to restore public order after two days of violent unrest.

Major Simone Schiavone, a spokesman for the Italian military in Iraq, said Italian forces returned fire, engaging in several extended gunbattles in the middle of the town.

Witnesses said several civilians were killed and wounded in the crossfire. Four Italian military vehicles were set alight and 12 Italian troops, out of a force of around 500 involved in the operation, were lightly wounded, Schiavone said

And then there's this:

l British officials said they had fought 18 skirmishes in a second day of clashes in Amarah near the Iranian border. Twelve Iraqis have been killed in two days of fighting, hospital officials were quoted as saying.

All those enemies (and all that "collateral damage") from one end of Iraq to the other actually means, as a lighthearted George W. Bush laughingly explained to the press yesterday, "Well, I think there's -- my judgment is, is that the closer we come to the deadline, the more likely it is people will challenge our will. In other words, it provides a convenient excuse to attack."

Meanwhile:

Sunni and Shi'ite residents of two Baghdad suburbs, once fierce enemies, said overnight they had put their differences aside to unite in their fight to oust the US occupying force from Iraq.

"All of Iraq is behind Moqtada al-Sadr, we are but one body, one people," declared Sheikh Raed al-Kazami, in charge of the radical Shi'ite cleric's offices at a mosque in the Shi'ite neighbourhood of Kazimiya, west of the Iraqi capital.

He spoke following three days of fierce clashes between militiamen loyal to Sadr that left at least 57 people dead and 236 wounded.

Al-Kazami said residents of the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya, a stone's throw from Kazimiya, had offered their support, as had residents from Ramadi and Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as well as residents of the northern city of Mosul.

The Muslim cleric, surrounded by armed bodyguards, said some Sunnis had even offered to join Sadr's militia.

To prove his point he displayed about 100 men in the gardens of the mosque who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles and who stood ready to join the battle.

So the dream of a united Iraq may come to pass after all.

First they told us that we went into Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein, but there were no weapons. Then they said we went into Iraq because Saddam had worked with al Qaeda, but we have found no evidence of those ties. Finally, they insisted that the real reason we went into Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people from their ruthless dictator. Now, Saddam is behind bars, his sons are dead and yet Iraqis from one end of the country to the other, Sunni and Shi'a alike, are "the enemies" that we must "take out."

How generous we are. How much we love freedom. Once we "take out" all those ungrateful Iraqis, I'm sure that Iraq will be the democratic paradise we all imagined it could be and the tyrannical dominoes of Arab nationalism and Islamic Radicalism will crash into one another in rapid succession.

Today Tony Blair said:

"Our response to this should not be to run away in fright or hide away, or think that we have got it all wrong," said Blair.

"Our response on the contrary should be to hold firm, because that's what the Iraqi people want."

Which Iraqi people? The freedom lovers or "the enemies?"



digby 4/06/2004 05:04:00 PM |

 
Unprepared

Do you think it would be too much to ask that James Carville to do a little bit of homework before he goes on Crossfire and represents the Democrats against the lying sack of excrement that calls itself Robert Novak?

Today, Novak dutifully regurgitates the Wing-nut Times' claims that since the Clinton administration didn't use the words al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden more than a handful of times in its national security assessment paper at the end of the last term that they were just as irresponsible about terrorism as Junior and the Retreads.

It's all over the blogosphere this morning that the article ignores the fact that it did discuss terrorism in great detail throughout the document and even outlined possible military options.

Now, I don't expect James Carville to immerse himself in the blogosphere, but since this article appeared in the GOP House organ, you'd think it might occur to him to question it or at least have someone on his staff look into what appears to be a total contradiction of all we have learned about Clinton's priorities. It certainly should not come as a surprise that Cheney's bitch might bring it up.

This happens all the time with him. Novak or Tucker Carlson hit him right between the eyes with a piece of propaganda and all he does is sputter "I know you are but what am I" instead of having the information at hand to refute the nonsense.


digby 4/06/2004 01:33:00 PM |

 
Unctuous Dick

Atrios links today to this NY Times piece exposing Dick Cheney's long time love for high oil prices.

I'm happy to see the DNC finally doing some real oppo for a change and pushing it into the media with the same finesse the GOP has shown for the last 12 years. It turns out that Dick and Dubious have been for high oil prices much more recently than 1986. Here's hoping that this gets disseminated as well:

1999: World Oil Said Bush Would Be the Perfect Presidential Candidate to Deal With Low Oil Prices.

In 1999, World Oil wrote that Bush "would be well aware of the fact that oil prices have collapsed" and "would seem to be the perfect individual to lead the charge in doing something about the [low] price of oil." The editorial said one possibility was that Bush and his father could persuade the Middle East to hold production, increasing prices, and that if Bush was successful in increasing the price of oil, "he could parlay his actions into substantial contributions." [World Oil, 2/99]

1999: Cheney Praised OPEC Production Cuts That Raised Oil Prices.

According to the Associated Press in March 1999, "OPEC members agreed today to cut crude oil production by 2.1 million barrels a day and maintain lower levels of output for a full year starting April 1, oil ministers said. The group of 11 oil producing nations approved the cuts in an effort to strengthen prices and end a global oil glut." Then-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney praised OPEC's decision. "I've been struck by the extent OPEC seems to have gotten its act together," said Cheney. [Dow Jones, 4/12/99; Mickey Kaus, Slate, 7/28/00; AP Online, 3/23/99]

digby 4/06/2004 12:51:00 PM |

 
Freedom

I was always somewhat confused by the comments of our brilliant National Security Advisor when she said:

"How can one mention Hitler and the U.S. president in the same sentence? And above all, how can such a comment come from the mouth of a German when one considers the sacrifices made by the United States when it acted to liberate the Germans from Hitler."

Seeing US involvement in WWII as a sacrifice made by the United States to "liberate the Germans from Hitler" always struck me as just a tad eccentric. That it came from one of the most powerful people in the government and one who considers herself a "Europeanist" certainly gave me pause. I worried that she might not be as smart as she should be.

Today, John O'Sullivan in the National Review articulates a view of the future of American involvement in Iraq that makes sense of Condi's statement. "Liberation," it appears, is a very malleable concept.

The most straightforward solution [to the security situation in Iraq] would be a draconian crackdown on all unrest --- curfews, house-to-house searches, firing on armed rioters, mass internment, widespread use of capital punishment for terrorists, and so on.

Western democracies only have the stomach for such harsh methods, however, when they believe they are fighting truly radical evil. The Allies in postwar Germany executed large numbers of German resisters because, among other reasons, Belsen and Dachau showed that Nazism was utterly bestial and the most brutal methods of suppressing it justified. Even so, the Allied occupation of Germany was before CNN, NGOs, and the "human-rights revolution." It is highly unlikely, even in the aftermath of Fallujah, that either the U.S. government would carry out --- or American public opinion support --- the execution of terrorists on a similar scale today.

That really is too bad. Some people might think that there is a tiny distinction between Germany, which invaded and occupied a huge portion of Europe, attacked Russia, declared war on the US, tried to exterminate all of Europe's Jews and created the bloodiest carnage in the history of the world --- and Iraq which we invaded and are occupying and which we ostensibly were liberating from a dictator whom we now have in custody. But they would be wrong. Obviously, the Iraqis are behaving just as badly as many of the Germans did when we liberated them from Hitler and they should, in a just world, be treated with the same iron hand.

If it weren't for the stupid American public, the liberal media and the idiotic "human rights revolution" we could do what is necessary to liberate the Iraqis by killing large numbers of them and thereby showing them what freedom is all about. But we can't.

Thank goodness O'Sullivan has a fallback position:

A second solution would be to establish order by bringing in massive numbers of U.S. and allied troops, imposing a regime of surveillance and supervision that is widespread and almost totalitarian but not brutal, using both human and technical intelligence to track down and remove the terrorists from society, and settling down to stay in Iraq for at least 30 years. In that way terrorist resistance might be administratively smothered over time. But since the U.S. has decided to reduce troop levels and hand over power to Iraqis in three months, this option has been foreclosed.

This would be the East German example, I guess. (Hey, when it came to occupying a country, the Soviets really knew how to keep a lid on trouble. Word to the wise.) Once again, the pussified US screwed the pooch because we don't know how handle a bunch of ingrates who fail to realize that we only care about their freedom. Otherwise we could create a totalitarian regime for them to live under for their own good. That is, after all, why we liberated them from Saddam, the totalitarian dictator.

But, we messed up and promised to turn over the country to the Iraqis themselves. What a mistake. So:

That leaves the third option --- which also happens to be the most practicable one in current circumstances --- namely, handing over power to a new Iraqi government and supporting it in its suppression of terrorism. A new Iraqi government will be in an improved version of the U.S. position a year ago.

It will be feared by its opponents; it will not have shown any psychological uncertainty in the face of "resistance;" and it will have the additional advantages of being (a) Iraqi, b) at least aspiringly democratic, and (c) knowledgeable about all sorts of local conditions. This combination will give it the legitimacy and the moral self-confidence to crack down on any unrest that either last-ditch Saddamites or foreign jihadists try to mount. And it may well conclude that it needs such weapons as the internment of suspected terrorists without trial to restore order and prevent a civil war.

Of course, U.S. troops will still be needed in force to support the new regime. Nor can Washington give a blank check endorsing any methods, however brutal, that it employs. Equally however, we should not seek to impose on Baghdad the kind of constitutional restraints that cripple American police in their everyday battles against conventional crime --- and that hobble Washington's responses today to the murder of Americans in Fallujah.

Ah. Now we're getting somewhere. We've had a little practice at supporting brutal puppet governments. This we know how to do. And the good thing is that we don't have to "cripple" the Iraqi government with all those unfortunate constitutional restraints that keep the US police from being able to shoot down suspected criminals or round them up and send them to jail indefinitely without a trial. Now that's what I call freedom.

Our Dear Leader himself said yesterday:

"We are being challenged in Iraq because there are people there that hate freedom."

Or was it "We are being challenged in Iraq because there are people here that hate freedom?" I'll have to check.




digby 4/06/2004 12:14:00 PM |

Monday, April 05, 2004

 
Confusion

...with Congress and the Bush Administration reluctant to pay for more active-duty troops, the use of contractors in places like Iraq will only grow. A Pentagon official who opposes their use nonetheless detects an obvious if unsentimental virtue: "The American public doesn't get quite as concerned when contractors are killed."

digby 4/05/2004 12:17:00 AM |

Sunday, April 04, 2004

 
Iraq Hacks

Now that Jim Wilkinson has hung up his GI Joe costume and is bustling all over Washington smearing Richard Clarke and saying the word "comfort" 437 times per minute, they've had to go to the bench for Operation FUBAR's spin team:

GOP Operatives Lead at Iraq Press Office:

"Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq.

Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who's now Energy Secretary, heads the office that includes a large number of former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.

More than one-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics.

One of the main goals of the Office of Strategic Communications -- known as stratcom -- is to ensure Americans see the positive side of the Bush administration's invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and a deadly insurgency thrives. "

(Other than that, everything is going just swimmingly.)

...The U.S. team stands in deep contrast to the British team that works alongside it, almost all of whom are civil or foreign service employees, not political appointees. Many of the British in Iraq display regional knowledge or language skills that most of the Americans lack.

They speak English, for instance.

The drive to re-elect Bush is a sensitive topic. Several coalition officials angered by what they see as CPA politicking -- with U.S. accomplishments in Iraq being trumpeted to help Bush -- grumbled privately, but would not go on record with complaints.

But Gordon Robison, a former CPA contractor who helped build the Pentagon-funded Al-Iraqiya television station in Baghdad, said Republicans in the press room intensely followed the Democratic presidential primaries as John Kerry emerged as the presumed nominee.

"Iraq is in danger of costing George W. Bush his presidency and the CPA's media staff are determined to see that does not happen," Robison said. "I had the impression in dealing with the civilians in the Green Room that they viewed their job as essentially political, promoting what the Coalition Provisional Authority is doing in Iraq as a political arm of the Bush administration," he added.

Robison, a journalist who said his political affiliation is a private matter, left Baghdad in March after finishing his contract with U.S. defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. A new U.S. contractor, Harris Corp., has taken over the Al-Iraqiya operations.

One CPA staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity said the press office had sent targeted "good news" releases to American television, radio and newspaper outlets that were timed to deflect criticism of Bush during the Democratic primaries.

Stratcom's schedule of news releases shows that stories were sent to media outlets in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Virginia and other states in the days before their Democratic primaries. But the schedule also shows releases sent to Virginia, Ohio and Florida after the primaries were over. Senor said any correlation to the vote was a coincidence.

Rich Galen, 57, a well-known Republican strategist, oversees the daily news releases sent directly to media outlets in the United States. Before joining the CPA press operation late last year, Galen wrote a GOP insider column and appeared on Fox News to harpoon liberal critics of Bush.

[...]

Outside political analysts, however, said Galen's vast expertise lies in political campaigning, not shipping radio and TV spots to local audiences. Putting a sharp strategist like him in the press room is a campaign masterstroke, said Bob Boorstin of the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan political think-tank in Washington.

"You know they're in trouble if they shipped Rich Galen over there," said Boorstin, who worked on four presidential campaigns, all Democratic.

"They're desperate to control the story over there. It's a very smart thing on their part. He knows what he's doing."

Galen was Newtie's flack. He's a master spinner. His web site says he is "what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher." No joke. Here's a little deconstruction of some typical Galen spin by Brendan Nyhan from September of 2001. This guy wrote the book.

Like all Republicans, he had himself photographed in an elaborate costume, leaning on a very butch piece of heavy equipment. He looks a little like a chorus boy in the road show of Kismet.



digby 4/04/2004 11:26:00 PM |

 
Growing Pains

Oh Lordy. Here we are again in one of those disavowal moments. Normally, I try not to weigh in on blog controversies like this because they are so likely to get me into trouble and I'm nothing but a big baby. However, this one is actually important because it signals a change in the blogosphere.

It all comes down to filthy capitalism, doesn't it? Once bloggers started taking advertising money they suddenly became answerable to their advertisers. Once they started raising money for candidates they became part of the campaign. It reminds me of those halcyon days when people were arguing about whether public broadcasting was a good idea or not. I think we can see from this little example that money is, indeed, the root of all evil. The times they are a changin' in the blogosphere.

Matt Stoller has what is probably the definitive take on this controversy, but I think Atrios's post is more important because he's so important. He sounds miffed, to be sure, but he's taken a brave stand. He's not going to stop expressing his opinion on his own terms, even though he's been raising a lot of money for the Democrats and would probably like to continue to collect a little cash from his blog ads himself. He's opting to continue to be a free-for-all blogger rather than a money raising insider. But, I'm afraid he might not get to sit at the table with the big boys again any time soon. This new synthesis of internet fundraising and blogging means that you have to decide what are your reasons for blogging and adjust yourself to the various realities that spring from that decision.

If you are blogging to express your unfettered opinion on public affairs, it's useful to note that opinion writers generally don't personally raise money for the political parties even though they are clearly political partisans. Even Rush doesn't troll for GOP money on his show. This is not just a matter "journalistic ethics" it's a matter of keeping a certain distance between politicians and those who might express uncomfortable opinions from time to time. Nobody demands that Bush disavow Krauthamer when he says we should nuke Fallujah or some such.

I don't doubt that columnists show up a fundraisers from time to time or at least socialize with fundraisers and politicians. But, by being able to float ideas or express opinions that the candidates simply can't express due to the mainstream necessities of our two party politics, they actually serve a valuable service. I think bloggers do this, too.

Columnists do work for newspapers which accept advertising from all political perspectives, but they don't allow profanity or inflammatory rhetoric such as that at the center of this controversy. And, one of the reasons they edit columnists is because if they wrote the way we do in the blogosphere they'd offend huge numbers of readers and advertisers would pull out. Certainly political advertisers would.

So, if you want to express an unfettered opinion, the online world is a great place to do it, probably the only place outside of your poor hearing impaired family and the bartender at the corner pub. But, you probably can't use that blog to directly raise money for candidates or run advertising for candidates unless you learn to pull your punches at least somewhat. The reality is that once you explicitly become a fundraiser for that candidate, or become enmeshed with the campaign apparatus, you become a sort of adjunct of the campaign. The real world implication of that is that the candidate's enemies will use what you say or do against the candidate. Candidates have to return "controversial" money all the time.

As for advertisers, newspapers and networks have all kinds of conventions like "chinese walls" to protect both the advertiser and the content from having to answer for the other. And, needless to say, any candidate is going to need the newspaper and the television much more than a blog to reach the critical mass of people so they will all fight for as much air time and column inches as they can get. Blogging is expendable if it causes too much grief.

So, it appears that we are at a crossroads. If what you want to do is be a fundraiser and political operative for a particular candidate, then you simply have to be aware of the ramifications of what you say and you have to exercise some control over the community you host or risk embarrassing the candidate you represent on your blog. There is obviously big money to be raised on the internet, so this paradigm is here to stay and it is perfectly valid.

If you want to make bucks by selling ads, you have to be aware that they could pull those ads in a hearbeat if you write things they feel are harmful to their products (candidates.) That's just reality in our happy little laissez-faire world. I would think that there are products out there that wouldn't mind being affiliated with foul-mouthed polemics, but political candidates are hardly the likliest ones, I'm afraid. So there may be a way to make a few sheckels at this, but partisan politics doesn't look like a good bet to me unless you are willing to edit yourself accordingly or find a way to persuade people that you have a chinese wall between the advertising and the content. Obviously, this is a perfectly acceptable form of blogging and I imagine that many people will find it tempting.

Or you can take the approach of an old fashioned pamphleteer, which is what blogging has mainly been up to now. Self-publish, say what you want, offer it for free and hope that somebody finds it interesting. On a political level you hope that you have an influence. If you are a big time blogger like Andrew Sullivan you can put up a tip jar and make big bucks, so there's even a financial model available that leaves you beholden to noone. Or, you could always find a benefactor or sugar daddy who will finance your blogging --- sort of a cross between being Sid Blumenthal and Anna Nicole Smith. If you do it this way you are free to tell anybody to go fuck themselves if they don't like what you are saying. And, if they de-link you? Who gives a damn? If you're good, people will find you. Stand outside the grinding political process and be proud to support your cause in your own way. Let the politicans play it safe. They'll thank you for it in the end.

There isn't anything wrong with any of these models but those bloggers who have a profile are going to have to think about this stuff and the candidates are going to have to find a way to take advantage of the blogosphere's influence without leaving themselves too open to their enemies's opportunism.

And, let's not kid ourselves. I hesitate to remind all of my blogging bretheren, but this "disavowal" movement is a bi-partisan, intra-partisan game. As ye sow and all that jazz...

Last year around this time we had another blogospheric tizzy and bloggers were gnashing their teeth about whether to link or de-link and what all. One blogger responded to a query on the matter and I think his thoughts are pertinent today:

Hi,

Everyone makes mistakes, and Sean-Paul has been very up front, honest and contrite about his. What more do people want? To string him up and flog him?

He provides a good service. I'll probably be taking his left-hand side link within the next couple of days, but that's because the war is waning and his coverage is straying into new areas. So the raison d' etre of running that
extra link is somewhat passing.

But I'm a forgiving guy. He copped to it right away and apologized.
Ultimately, his mistake had little to do with the value of the material
presented so I didn't even think twice about removing him.

I really hope that some of these bloggers freaking out about it don't make a mistake themselves someday. Writing has a lot of pitfalls. I'm a former journalist and a J.D., so I have a good idea of how to avoid such pitfalls.
But no one is perfect, and even I may fall into some unforeseen trap.

What comes around comes around. I like to keep a healthy supply of good karma handy.

Kos

Wise words.





digby 4/04/2004 03:23:00 PM |

Friday, April 02, 2004

 
Fetid Moldy Cakewalk

The horrifying spectacle of Falluja seems to be, predictably, about more than what they are saying.

The anti-American hatred isn't confined to Fallujah and it isn't just in the Sunni Triangle. Civilians and foreigners are being targeted and escalating brutality is the order of the day all over Iraq. Meanwhile, the "contractors," all ex-special forces who were ostensibly there to protect food convoys (uh huh) are reported to have been part of a 4 vehicle convoy, a fact which the US denies.

You know, I'm really getting tired of being lied to. It's exhausting. Just what the hell is really going on in Iraq?

Certainly there are few communities where anti-American sentiment is as widespread as in Fallujah. But the savagery and utter abandonment of any sort of civilized conduct, so amply demonstrated on the streets of the city Wednesday, is actually pretty typical of the way the opposition has chosen to fight its war against American occupation everywhere else, as well. Wednesday's attack itself was hardly the worst thing we've seen; in fact, since the victims had been armed, attacking them was arguably within the rules of war.

Many of the attacks we've seen in just the past 10 days were clearly not; the victims often were attacked merely because they were civilians, many of them not even from Coalition countries. They included two Finnish businessmen, a German and a Dutchman, four missionaries working on a water project and a Time magazine translator.

It's become increasingly clear that any foreigner, and anyone working even remotely with foreigners, has become what the opposition regards as fair game, armed, or not. Attacks on Iraqis have been if possible even more savage, and divorced from any possible justification. Suicide bombs and ambushes of Iraqi policemen, who have now lost more men than the occupation forces, are one thing; the Americans chose and trained them. But the Shia who were slaughtered by teams of suicide bombers during the Ashoura festival in Karbala last month were doing nothing more than peacefully exercising their religious beliefs something denied them under Saddam's Sunni rule.

[...]


What is surprising is that four American contractors would have put themselves into such a vulnerable situation, in such a well-known trouble spot. The victims apparently worked for Blackwater Security Consulting, a North Carolina-based security company that specializes in close-protection VIP details and has the high-profile, no-bid contract to provide bodyguards for L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator. U.S. officials have released little detail about why they were in Fallujah, except to say they were guarding food convoys into the area. Not only does that sound improbable, but there was no sign of any trucks being escorted by them at the time. However, Iraqi eyewitnesses interviewed on the street in Fallujah today say the two SUVs carrying the four victims were actually part of a four-vehicle convoy but that the two other SUVs managed to escape after the attack. Standard operating procedure for close-protection details is to put the people they're protecting into more expensive and less maneuverable armored cars, and then follow in soft-skinned cars with the shooters. But U.S. officials insist there were only two cars.

The incident is inexplicably mysterious, even two days later. Witnesses in Fallujah insisted that one of the four victims, all of whom had been armed with sidearms and long weapons, was a woman, described as fair-skinned, red-headed and dressed in a military uniform. Military spokesmen, however, described all four as men. When did it happen, even? Witnesses say 11 a.m. or noon on Wednesday, Iraqi police say 9 or 10 a.m. and Coalition spokesmen say about 8 a.m. And why did the Marines, who have troops stationed on the outskirts of Fallujah, fail to respond to the scene, either during or after the attack at least not as of late this afternoon, 30 hours after the incident?

The AP reported the names of only 3 of the victims and all three are men. I don't know what to make of the reports of a woman being involved. Women are not to my knowledge in front line roles in the US Special Forces, so the military uniform is strange, but perhaps some of these private "security" soldiers are women. Strange.

I wrote about the private security contractors a year ago when it was first disclosed and it appears that we have privatized much of the security duties there and we're spending big bucks to do it. The LA Times and others report today that security firms are doing a booming business in Iraq

The vast majority of their work in Iraq is government-funded, either through direct contracts with government agencies or indirectly as security for firms that have contracts to help rebuild Iraq.

[...]

Business is booming, security experts said, because a surge in violence has come precisely as a flood of contractors is poised to roll into the country now that $8 billion in U.S. contracts have been awarded.

[...]


They escort convoys of supplies. And some are preparing elaborate tracking systems so that if a contractor's vehicle runs into trouble, its occupants can be located and rescued.

For months, the presence of security firms has been hard to ignore. Their large four-wheel-drive vehicles whiz along highways, traveling well over 100 mph to discourage insurgents from tailing them. They pull out of heavily fortified compounds and careen into traffic, forcing other vehicles out of their way.

The Western security experts are easily identified. They are muscular men, often wearing flak jackets and conspicuously carrying MP-5 submachine guns a German-made weapon favored by special operations forces. They tuck revolvers into leg holsters.

Experts estimate that the thousands of security professionals in the country probably outnumber workers in any other private industry. They include large numbers of Nepalese Gurkhas, who guard many of the coalition's headquarters in the Iraqi provinces, and former South African soldiers.

But at the top the pay scale are American and British security workers who are former Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Marines, Special Operations soldiers, CIA workers, British Special Air Services members and British Royal Marines. Many have worked with intelligence units in their former services and continue to have access to information unavailable to civilians.

Blackwater, for example, was founded by former Navy SEAL Gary Jackson and includes many former commandos in its top ranks. A company spokesman said 70% of its trainees come from the military, mainly from commando units.

[...]


A primary appeal to security workers is the money. The best paid of the private security staffers the most experienced and elite former soldiers earn as much as $20,000 a month, security experts in Iraq say.

Most Western contractors rely on Iraqi subcontractors for almost all labor. Security firms, on the other hand, make heavy use of workers from outside Iraq.

The deep experience of the guards goes into the sales pitch offered by security firms that the prospective client is in a treacherous setting but will be getting the best protection. But sometimes no amount of experience or expertise is enough.

"How many private security guys have been killed here? A lot," said one security expert in Baghdad. "At least 50, maybe more; there's been six just this week."

As an aside, can somebody explain why Paul Bremer of all people has private security guards? Isn't he, at least, an actual member of the US Government and thus shouldn't he be guarded by actual US soldiers?

Perhaps there's nothing really wrong with this. I'm sure these guys are patriots and fine gentlemen all. Certainly, they don't deserve to be dragged through streets and dismembered. However, this practise of privatizing the military (aside from the wet-dreams it gives the libertarians) is a very dicey idea. There is little accountability and a very bad recent history in the Balkans (although there have been no suggestions of this kind of corruption in iraq.) But, the problem remains. They are private contractors, not subject to the direction of the US Military and they work in a gray area which allows them to operate outside of normal law and custom.

It may be a necessary evil at the moment, but I have to believe that most of these elite highly trained special forces guys, anyway, would have stayed in the US military without a second thought if they'd have been offered even a modicum of the big bucks they are offered on the outside. But, that would have cut out the middle man and the middle man is what fuels the Military Industrial Complex. And while Democrats have certainly taken their taste over the last 30 years, the MID remains one of the very special friends and supporters of the modern Republican Party.

Just because the war in Iraq is a cock-up of humongous proportions is no reason that people shouldn't make a buck, right? At least some good will come of it.


Jeanne D'Arc has the definitive round-up on this topic. Read it now.





digby 4/02/2004 12:05:00 PM |

 
Another Grown-Up

Thanks to Kevin at Catch.com (which is called that for a reason) we find that the Senator Jim Bunning, who recently said his Italian American opponent looks like Uday and Qusay, has a history of classy campaigning. He's one o' those uniters not dividers:

One ad was shot at August's Fancy Farm political picnic, where the low-key Mr. Baesler surprised and even shocked a lot of political watchers, Democratic officials and reporters with a speech that many described as over-the-top.

Mr. Baesler ranted, raved, screamed, hollered, pounded the podium and shook his fists. He moved around the podium so much that one Lexington Herald-Leader reporter wrote that Mr. Baesler, a former University of Kentucky basketball player, looked like he was trying to guard it.

But Mr. Bunning had a film crew take some shots of the speech. Music from Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" was added. And according to the Baesler camp some selective edits were made -- a charge the Bunning campaign denies -- to make Mr. Baesler appear like a frenzied Adolf Hitler in a Nazi propaganda film.

The music, by the way, was by one of Hitler's favorite composers. It was also used in the film Apocalypse Now during a scene in which a village in Vietnam is blasted.

"It is a deliberate attempt to portray Scotty Baesler in a Hitler-esque image," said Bob Wiseman, Mr. Baesler's campaign manager.

Mr. Baesler wants the ad, showing in most of Kentucky, off the air. The Bunning campaign says forget it.

Kyle Simmons, Mr. Bunning's campaign spokesman, said the music was also used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and nobody tried to make Mr. Baesler look like Hitler.

What's up with that, doc? There is nothing cartoonish about that ad. See it, if you can, and make your own decision.

The second ad deals with the vote Mr. Baesler made in Congress for NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Baesler has since said it was a mistake, but he voted for NAFTA, which is blamed for the loss of thousands of jobs in southern Kentucky to Central America.

The ad criticizes Mr. Baesler's vote. But right at the end an Hispanic man walks on to the screen, gives a thumbs up and says, "Mucho gracias, senor Baesler."

Now, I don't want to accuse Republicans of political hate speech. That would not be correct. Political hate speech is when a Democrat accuses a Republican of lying or makes fun of President Bush. Senator Bunning just has a lively sense of humor and it's nothing more than typical leftist political correctness run amuck to suggest otherwise.

Get Over It.


digby 4/02/2004 10:54:00 AM |

Thursday, April 01, 2004

 
Alpha Weenies

Instapundit and his little friends are all in a tizzy about this picture of John Kerry. They are saying things like:

"The whole look, of course, is appalling: the vest, the gloves, the botox."

"Thanks for posting that picture of Kerry today. Right now the French are pursing their lips and narrowing their eyes in shrewd appraisal: 'Daisy zipper pull, snowboard with mural graphics, sunglasses hanging from fleece shirt, thin vest-like outer garment. Yes. Clearly this man is the true Alpha Weenie."

Hugh Hewitt says: "Just the man to instill fear in the hearts of our enemies."

Oh yes. Alpha Weenies are so icky aren't they? I know that when I saw this one I got a little bit nervous:





Here's a little contrast that might be useful in determining the alpha weenieness of the presidential candidates:



Here's Kerry going down a hill:




Here's Bush going down a hill:




Look, George Bush can drive!



And his pick-up could go way faster down a mountain than that alpha weenie Kerry could, too. Way faster.




Update: Sadly No has The Scoop on the AlphaWeenie issue

digby 4/01/2004 07:22:00 PM |

 
A New Face For VP?

Last night John Kerry held a major big time gala here in Hollywood and a great American and patriot put himself forth for consideration as Vice President of the United States. The Los Angeles Times reports that none other than Larry David, star of Curb Your Enthusiasm and misanthrope extraordinaire has thrown his hat into the VP ring:

In deeply moving remarks which left not a dry eye in the house he said:

"I know it sounds a little crazy on its face. Why would he consider a bald, tactless, dishonest --- and dare I say Jew ---to be his running mate? But... think about this: out of all the other potential candidates I am the only one who offsets Bush and balances out the ticket ... because whatever qualities [Bush] has that people find appealing, I have those same qualities in spades.

David said his own qualities included being a "nincompoop," a "coward," a "liar" and a mediocre student.

"Go ahead, ask me who's the president of Japan? I don't know. Ask me what was in the newspaper today. Don't know ...Ask me what foreign countries I've been to. None!"

The president, said David, "avoided Vietnam by going into the Air National Guard. I avoided it by going into the Army Reserve... he couldn't outchicken me. My cowardice is legendary."

"And I'm homophobic to boot! Don't tell me that's not gonna swing some voters."

When Kerry took the stage at Ron Burkle's hillside mansion, he thanked David: "You are qualified to be a Republican. Tonight, rest assured, you did absolutely nothing to change my mind about you and the vice presidency."

I think we've got our ticket. And he's worth at least a hundred mil!

link missing because LA Times Calendar section is so FUBAR'd it's not worth it, even though it's free for a subscriber like me.



digby 4/01/2004 06:38:00 PM |

 
There He Goes Again

In today's Washington Post article on Condi's undelivered speech, called "Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense," professional liar Jim Wilkinson proves once again that brass balls can't substitute for Googling before you speak.

The president's commitment to fighting terrorism isn't measured by the number of speeches, but by the concrete actions taken to fight the threat," said James R. Wilkinson, deputy national security adviser for communications, when asked about the speech. "The first major foreign policy directive of this administration was the new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda that the White House ordered soon after taking office. It was eliminating al Qaeda, not missile defense, not Iraq, and not the [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty," he said.

The administration requested such a directive in May 2001, but it did not take shape until a week before Sept. 11, according to a staff report of the commission investigating attacks. Bush signed the final directive in October, weeks after the attack.

OK. In May 2001, Bush asked why we didn't stop "swatting flies" and just find a way to take out al Qaeda. Condi yawned and said "sure, I'll get right on that." He never asked about it again. That was the directive that was "requested" but not signed until after 9/11. And, the president didn't take any more significant action on missile defense, Iraq or the ABM treaty, right? Wilkinson couldn't be dumb enough to suggest that if it weren't true.

No, he just thinks we are. Here is the speech that Bush gave to the National Defense University on May 1, 2001.

"...this is still a dangerous world, a less certain, a less predictable one. More nations have nuclear weapons and still more have nuclear aspirations. Many have chemical and biological weapons. Some already have developed the ballistic missile technology that would allow them to deliver weapons of mass destruction at long distances and at incredible speeds. And a number of these countries are spreading these technologies around the world

Most troubling of all, the list of these countries includes some of the world's least-responsible states. Unlike the Cold War, today's most urgent threat stems not from thousands of ballistic missiles in the Soviet hands, but from a small number of missiles in the hands of these states, states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life.

[...]

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the world joined forces to turn him back. But the international community would have faced a very different situation had Hussein been able to blackmail with nuclear weapons. Like Saddam Hussein some of today's tyrants are gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America. They hate our friends, they hate our values, they hate democracy and freedom and individual liberty. Many care little for the lives of their own people. In such a world, Cold War deterrence is no longer enough.

[...]

We need a new framework that allows us to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today's world. To do so, we must move beyond the constraints of the 30 year old ABM TreatyThis treaty does not recognize the present, or point us to the future. It enshrines the past. No treaty that prevents us from addressing today's threats, that prohibits us from pursuing promising technology to defend ourselves, our friends and our allies is in our interests or in the interests of world peace.

[...]

Today,I'm announcing the dispatch of high-level representatives to Allied capitals in Europe, Asia, Australia and Canada to discuss our common responsibility to create a new framework for security and stability that reflects the world of today. They will begin leaving next week.

The delegations will be headed by three men on this stage: Rich Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and Steve Hadley; Deputies of the State Department, the Defense Department and the National Security staff. Their trips will be part of an ongoing process of consultation, involving many people and many levels of government, including my Cabinet Secretaries.

We will seek their input on all the issues surrounding the new strategic environment. We'll also need to reach out to other interested states, including China and Russia. Russia and the United States should work together to develop a new foundation for world peace and security in the 21st century. We should leave behind the constraints of an ABM Treaty that perpetuates a relationship based on distrust and mutual vulnerability.

[...]

This is a time for vision; a time for a new way of thinking; a time for bold leadership. The Looking Glass no longer stands its 24-hour-day vigil. We must all look at the world in a new, realistic way, to preserve peace for generations to come.

You really have to wonder where people might have gotten the idea that the Bush administration placed a higher priority on missile defense, the ABM treaty and Iraq than on terrorism, don't you? And sending three of your top national security guys to all the world's capitals wouldn't be considered, you know...action. It was more like direction.

Now, maybe asking why we are "swatting at flies" in a meeting is more of a "directive" than dispatching Armitage, Wolfowitz, and Hadley across the globe as part of an "ongoing process of consultation, involving many people and many levels of government, including my Cabinet Secretaries" to discuss our "new security framework."

And maybe it is a mistake to assume that just because the president announced that this new security framework consisted of elimination of the ABM treaty and the building of a missile defense system it means that he believed these things to be of a higher priority than terrorism, which he never mentions at all as part of his new security framework.

And just because he specifically mentions Saddam Hussein and Iraq as the prime example of the dreaded rogue state that missile defense is supposed to guard against does not mean that the Bushies had Iraq on the brain when they were fashioning their new security framework.

And maybe Jim Wilkinson is a low life, political hack who lies even when the White House web site contradicts his statements in minute detail. President Bush and the rest of his fossilized cold war retreads were focused on missile defense and Iraq on May 1, 2001 and they were still focused on missile defense and Iraq on September 11, 2001.

And again, it must be noted that these observations are not really new. The American Prospect's Jason Vest, wrote about this stuff ages ago. Here's one from June of 2002, called "Why Warnings Fell On Deaf Ears"

There's no need to take this critic's word for it; just visit the Center for Security Policy's Web site. Judging from the dozens of "reports" the center has issued since the August 1998 embassy bombings, the most urgent threats to American national security are, in no particular order: China, ballistic missiles, Cuba, Iraq, and threats posed to Israel by Syria and Yasir Arafat. Osama bin Laden's terrorist network doesn't make the cut. Indeed, only two of the center's "reports" since 1998 have dealt with al-Qaeda, and even those have done so only indirectly. According to the center, the most important lesson learned from the 1998 attacks was one illustrated by the U.S. retaliation against the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant: that there's no way "chemical weapons can be effectively and verifiably banned," which proves that it's necessary to kill any form of chemical weapons control

It would be tempting to laugh this off if Gaffney's group weren't so influential. As one page on the Center for Security Studies Web site proudly notes, no fewer than 22 of the center's advisory council members now occupy key national security positions in the Bush administration. So no matter what congressional or other inquiries reveal about the failures of intelligence, it should come as no surprise that whatever intelligence was put in front of policy makers about hijacked airplanes (as missiles or otherwise) got little traction. With Iraq spawning terrorist legions, China girding for World War III, North Korea looking to launch a missile at Alaska, and Fidel Castro plotting to destroy the Colossus of the North, there simply wasn't any room for bin Laden in the pantheon of threats that govern the Bush security orthodoxy.

There really is no point in the Bush administration trying to claim that they ever gave a damn about terrorism. They didn't believe that asymetrical terrorism even existed. What's more, they may not even believe it exists today. They still care more about missile defense and American global military dominance. I don't think we've seen any evidence whatsoever that 9/11 or the lack of WMD in Iraq has changed their minds at all.




digby 4/01/2004 04:07:00 PM |

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

 
The Worst Of All Possible Worlds

I sure wish those naysaying lefties would just shut up about our so-called failure in Iraq. They are just wrong.

Like, for instance, that commie bastard Bruce Fein who wrote in the Washington Times today that the new Iraqi government is fucked up five ways to Friday and there is almost no hope that it won't fly apart like the Big Bang the minute the US turns over sovereignty:

Volcanic. That characterizes a heated symposium I attended in Ankara, Turkey, last week sponsored by the Foreign Policy Institute and Bilkent University to appraise "Iraq on the way to its new Constitution." The attendees included Iraqi participants in the March 8, 2004, interim constitution promulgated by the 25 member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Other attendees hailed from Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The symposium exposed numerous fault lines destined to fracture Iraq soon after the Coalition Provisional Authority and United States sovereignty dissolve on June 30, 2004:

• An interim constitution and Iraqi Transitional Government devoid of legitimacy.
• A legal system denuded of legal principles.
• An irreconcilable conflict between the universal tenets of Islam and fundamental democratic freedoms.
• Implacable embitterment of Kurds toward Arabs born of their wretched oppression and genocide under Saddam Hussein.
• A demand by Turkmen to the same language and autonomy privileges enjoyed by Kurds.
• And exchanges and monologues that smacked more of belligerence than of fraternity.

[...]

The staggering blunders of the Bush administration in governing post-Saddam Iraq have left no satisfactory post-June 30 denouements. The least bad option is a managed partition into statelets for Kurds, Turkmen, Sunnis and Shi'ites to escape a reprise of Yugoslavia's blood-stained disintegration.

Symposium participants challenged Iraqi representatives to defend the legitimacy of their constitutional handiwork, soporifically styled the "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period." No member of the IGC was elected. All were appointed by the United States. None enjoy more than a crumb of popular support.

A favorite of the Defense Department, Ahmed Chalabi, is more reviled than Saddam Hussein. The interim constitution was neither drafted nor debated in a public forum before its promulgation. The document turned precepts of self-government on their heads.

The defenders fatuously retorted that the interim constitution and the IGC deserved legitimacy because both were superior to Saddam Hussein and Ba'athist tyranny. By that yardstick, a restoration of the King Feisel dynasty would be defensible.

[...]

The seminar changed no minds. Differences were more aggravated than softened. Contemplating Iraq's future evoked visions of civil war featuring rocket propelled grenades and AK-47s, not free and fair national assembly elections monitored by United Nations observers.

The United States should declare its post-Saddam nation-building enterprise a failure. It should begin immediately to arrange the partition of Iraq by regional self-determination plebiscites. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it would be the worst imaginable last chapter of Operation Enduring Freedom, except for all the plausible alternative scripts.

Another fifth columnist for Kerry, no doubt. Must have a book coming out.


digby 3/30/2004 06:35:00 PM |

 
Dana's Little Secret

Gosh, listening to Dana Rohrabacher tonight on Hardball castigating Clarke and the Clinton administration for letting al Qaeda get away with murder for eight years, you'd almost think he hadn't been up to his ears in the Taliban for years:

Rohrabacher’s post-Sept. 11 finger-pointing was a fraud designed to distract attention from his own ongoing meddling in the foreign-policy nightmare. Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a "dual tract" policy with the Taliban.

A veteran U.S. foreign-policy expert told the Weekly, "If Dana’s right-wing fans knew the truth about his actual, working relationship with the Taliban and its representatives in the Middle East and in the United States, they wouldn’t be so happy."

Nowadays, Rohrabacher and his numerous aides are quick to provide copies of the congressman’s pre-Sept. 11 rants against the Taliban. They will tell you that he labeled them "a pack of dogs killing anyone" and "the most anti-Western, anti-female, anti-human rights regime in the world." They will also show you records of the congressman berating Clinton administration foreign-policy advisors for misreading Taliban intentions and for trying to negotiate peace in Afghanistan with the militant Islamic group’s Mullah Mohammed Omar, a bin Laden associate.

What they won’t mention is that Rohrabacher also once lobbied shamelessly for the Taliban. A November/December 1996 article in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported, "The potential rise of power of the Taliban does not alarm Rohrabacher" because the congressman believes the "Taliban could provide stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S." Later in the article, Rohrabacher claimed that:

•Taliban leaders are "not terrorists or revolutionaries."

•Media reports documenting the Taliban’s harsh, radical beliefs were "nonsense."

•The Taliban would develop a "disciplined, moral society" that did not harbor terrorists.

•The Taliban posed no threat to the U.S.

Although he continues to describe himself as an expert on Afghan history and politics, Rohrabacher was obviously dead wrong on all counts.

Evidence of Rohrabacher’s attempts to conduct his own foreign policy became public on April 10, 2001, not in the U.S., but in the Middle East. On that day, ignoring his own lack of official authority, Rohrabacher opened negotiations with the Taliban at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, ostensibly for a "Free Markets and Democracy" conference. There, Rohrabacher secretly met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, an advisor to Mullah Omar. Diplomatic sources claim Muttawakil sought the congressman’s assistance in increasing U.S. aid—already more than $100 million annually—to Afghanistan and indicated that the Taliban would not hand over bin Laden, wanted by the Clinton administration for the fatal bombings of two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole. For his part, Rohrabacher handed Muttawakil his unsolicited plans for war-torn Afghanistan. "We examined a peace plan," he laconically told reporters in Qatar.

To this day, the congressman has refused to divulge the contents of his plan. However, several diplomatic sources say it’s likely he asked the extremists to let former Afghan King Zahir Shah return as the figurehead of a new coalition government. In numerous speeches before and after Sept. 11, Rohrabacher has claimed the move would help stabilize Afghanistan for an important purpose: the construction of an oil pipeline there. In return, the plan would reportedly have allowed the Taliban to maintain power until "free" elections could be called.

[...]

After Taliban-related terrorists attacked the U.S. last September, Rohrabacher associates worked hard to downplay the Qatar meeting. Republican strategist Grover Norquist told a reporter that the congressman had accidentally encountered the Taliban official in a hotel hallway.

Read The Rest

I think it might also be a good idea to drop old Tweety a line and let him know that people are aware of Rohrabacher's little sideline and that it might not be a good idea to present him as a Richard Clarke character assassin without also revealing his own sordid invlovement with the Taliban.


digby 3/30/2004 04:38:00 PM |

 
Pass It On

From future radio star Julia on The American Street

You folks may have heard that there is a new Liberal radio network going on the air tomorrow at noon with (I love this) The O'Franken Factor.

Here's how you listen.


New York WLIB - 1190 AM

Los Angeles KBLA - 1580 AM

Chicago WNTD - 950 AM

Portland, OR KPOJ - 620 AM

Inland Empire, CA KCAA - 1050 AM

XM Satellite - Radio Channel 167

San Francisco Coming Soon

You can also get the feed at their website.

FYI: I spent some time yesterday talking to Janeane Garofalo and her cohost, Sam Seder during a runthrough of their show, the Majority Report, and I hear (to my utter amazement) that I'm going to be back at some point when they go on the air.

Bloggers you will definitely be hearing from on the Majority Report: Atrios, Kos and the editor of Liberal Oasis.

Word is that all three of them give really good radio.

Click through for the schedule.

Monday-Friday

Morning Sedition: 6:00-9:00am

This is a fast paced morning show that will entertain and engage audiences with wit and political satire. It will feature the latest news, offering up to-the-minute interviews with newsmakers, analysis and strong opinions.

Co-Host: Marc Maron

Co-host: Sue Ellicott

Co-host: Mark Riley


Unfiltered: 9:00am- 12:00pm

Air America’s midmorning program is a showcase for conversation about the political and culture state of the union. Unfiltered introduces listeners to fresh new voices not available in mainstream media.

Co-host: Lizz Winstead

Co-host: Chuck D

Co-host: Rachel Maddow


The O’ Franken Factor: 12:00-3:00pm

After debunking right-wing propaganda in his bestselling books Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken is taking the fight to America's airwaves--and he's doing it drug-free. With his co-host, veteran radio personality Katherine Lanpher, Franken will deliver three hours a day of fearlessly irreverent commentary, comedy, and interviews. Franken and Lanpher have a mean streak a smile wide. The O'Franken Factor will energize fans, infuriate liars, and deliver the truth--in what Al Franken likes to call the Zero Spin Zone.

Host: Al Franken

Co-host: Katherine Lanpher

Producer: Billy Kimball


The Randi Rhodes Show: 3:00-7:00pm

Randi Rhodes has spent the last 20 years burning up the airwaves in southern Florida with her pointed and provocative brand of talk radio. Combining live interview, call-in and commentary, Randi engages her audience with a passionate presentation.

Host: Randi Rhodes


So What Else is News?: 7:00-8:00pm

Based in Los Angeles, this is a one-hour program showcasing the intersection of politics, media and popular culture. This program will feature analysis and reports from the presidential campaign, as well as a daily reporters’ roundtable on how the news of the day is affected and reflected by the media. Marty will also cover the spinning of the news with a regular segment called “The Corrections.” This is also the place to hear the political voice of Hollywood, with celebrity guest interviews from the entertainment industries.

Host: Marty Kaplan


The Majority Report: 8:00pm-11:00pm

This program will introduce new, younger voices and opinions, with live guests from the world of politics, the arts and entertainment.

Host: Janeane Garofalo

Co-host: Sam Seder

Saturday and Sunday

Air America Radio’s weekend line-up will offer more original programming, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papatanio’s “Champions of Justice,” a program that brings a fresh and entertaining perspective to talk radio from the top legal and social issues focused minds in the country. Additional programming will include Best-of Air America Radio and Best-of-O’Franken Factor as well as other original programming to be announced soon.

digby 3/30/2004 04:07:00 PM |

 
Nice Try

So Wolfie said just now that Krugman was wrong when he called him "willing to be used" in his column today in which he quoted Wolf as saying on the air:

"...wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

I warned you

Wolfie claims that he was talking about these comments by Jim Wilkinson a few days before and showed footage of him saying:

...Let me also point something. If you look in this book you find interesting things such as reported in the "Washington Post" this morning. He's talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of "X-Files" stuff, and this is a man in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who is supposed to be focused on it and he was focused on meetings.

C'mon, Wolf. You can do better than this. Wilkinson was talking shit allright (not that you mentioned it at the time, of course) but he didn't say a thing about his "personal life" or any "weird aspects in his life."

We all know what trash you were peddling, you cheap trollop. You are just lucky that you were talking to John King instead of one of the Botox Barbies or we would have undoubtedly been treated to a gossipy GOP spoon fed bitch fest, which was obviously premature. You're supposed to wait until Drudge or The Sun runs it so you can call it "out there" and claim you had no choice. You know that.


digby 3/30/2004 03:26:00 PM |

 
Less Than Lies, More Than Truth

Matthew Yglesias has a very interesting new article over on American Prospect regarding the Bush administration's sophisticated dissembling techniques. I am struck by this particular passage, however, and I have to say that it kind of freaks me out:

A new paper by Steven Kull, Clay Ramsey, and Evan Lewis shows a similar dynamic at work in foreign policy. The authors examined the pervasiveness of three pieces of misinformation in the American public: that the United States has discovered WMD in Iraq, that evidence has been found showing that the Iraqi regime worked closely with al-Qaeda, and that world opinion favored America's decision to go to war. Support for the war was found to be highly correlated with the possession of false beliefs on these three matters -- 86 percent of those who believed all three supported the war, as did 78 percent of those who believed two, and 53 percent of those who believed just one. Among people who knew the truth on all three scores, just 23 percent supported the war. One key finding was that misinformation about the state of world opinion was the single strongest predictor of support for the war. In light of the fact that as late as February 2003 polls showed strong support for the proposition that war should be undertaken only with U.N. approval, it is tempting to speculate that the administration's campaign to portray U.N. opposition as solely a matter of French intransigence rather than as reflecting almost universal hostility to the undertaking was a crucial factor in building public support for the invasion.

I'm not sure the country can survive if this persists. This is post-modernism in the most obvious sense and the great irony is that it's being perpetrated by people who call themselves "conservatives."





digby 3/30/2004 02:58:00 PM |

 
Joint Chiefs

Alberto Gonzales has made the grand accomodation of allowing all ten members of the 9/11 commission interview President bush and Vice-President Cheney --- jointly.

I think that's probably a good idea. It's pretty obvious that the president is clueless so he needs to have Unka Dick there to translate when he makes statements that sound like the babbling of a 6th grader. ("You can't see what you think is a threat and hope it goes away. You used to could when the oceans protected us.")

Even the Republicans on the commission might get scared if he "visited" with them all by himself.



digby 3/30/2004 02:32:00 PM |

 
I Won't Be Ignoooored, Condi

Oh, I see.

Richard Clarke was a crazed martinet who made the Bush administration hate him because of his obsessive monomania so they just did everything they could to get away from the freak. (Clinton was such a slippery phony that he was able to fool Clarke into thinking he gave a shit. The minx.)

I don't like obsessive people either. They really get on your nerves what with pushing their agenda all the time and acting like their shit is more important than your shit. Then they get all pissed off when they get ignored and they go out a write books making themselves look better. If I were George W. Bush I would especially hate it if some wierdo did it

after 30 years of service in 4 different administrations...

and the worst terrorist attack in history...

which he predicted ...

and I blew him off...

and continued to blow him off...

to further pursue an agenda he knew was even more destructive...

Get off my back, dude.

This psycho-bureaucrat theory seems to be that Clarke rubbed people the wrong way and was therefore responsible for the fact that nobody listened to him. Perhaps he should have donned a cowboy hat and called Stephen Hadley "four eyes" in NSC meetings so that the Bush people would have been more comfortable with him.

Seriously, this is really more character assassination and it's disturbing to see wise and intelligent people discussing this in these terms. Nobody really knows what makes Richard Clarke tick and nobody knows whether he was so obsessive that he reached some sort of emotional breaking point in which he couldn't take it any longer and so he decided to go public. Maybe he's a real prick and nobody could stand him. So what? The "bureaucratic turf" he was so unpleasantly pushing was counter-terrorism and he wasn't alone in pushing it. Surely the "grown-ups" like Cheney and Rummy have encountered unpleasant personalities during their vaunted careers. In this day and age, if you think your point man in charge of counter-terrorism is a nutty Ahab you fire him, you don't ignore him.

And this guy had survived bureaucratic turf wars for 30 years, reportedly always being something less than Miss Manners and nothing before had made him so repulsive that he had to take the most serious step of resignation and going public. Something happened, here. The Bush people want to say it was greed or partisanship and now others are saying that he was too emotional to be believable and basically he took this step out of a fit of pique.

But, that means there must be an epidemic of bureaucratic mental illness in the government because that's the only way to explain these other wacked out personalities like Rand Beers and Donald Kerrick and Roger Cressey and Paul O'Neill and John Brady Kiesling and Joseph Wilson and John H. Brown and Don North and Anthony Zinni and Karen Kwiatkowski and and Ray McGovern and Ray Mcmichael all of whom who have spoken out and/or resigned because of the administration's handling of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. Apparently, the place is just crawling with assholes who don't know that you can get more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

I don't doubt that he was extremely unpleasant at times when he was trying to get people to pay attention to him and they ignored him. And I hope that I, too, would have gotten a little testy about that if I KNEW THAT TERRORISTS WERE GOING TO KILL AMERICANS AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND HIS STAFF REFUSED TO EVEN CALL A FUCKING CABINET MEETING ABOUT IT!

I realize that George W. Bush operates in a very formal way and his staff may not have appreciated being badgered. But, it was terrorism we are talking about here, not faith based initiatives or steel tarrifs. Lives were at stake and I think it is expected that the president of the United States' staff can rise above such parochial concerns to evaluate the facts at hand.

But, that would require that they be open to facts that don't fit their circa 1992 fossilized PNAC assessment of threats. They were not. And even worse, the facts clearly show that even after 9/11 they refused to adjust their thinking. This was about the national security of the United States and it really doesn't merit consideration that his "likeability" was relevant in light of the terrible consequences we suffered on September 11th.



And I think that the reason they "refuse to just tell the truth" as in :

In retrospect, of course we wish we had paid more attention to terrorism. Everybody in the U.S. government does. After all, 3000 people died. It was a terrible misjudgment and a wakeup call for all of us. (I'm sure they could figure out a better way to say it, but you get the idea.)

Yes, we did focus on Iraq, and for good reasons. (Proceed to give reasons, which hopefully they can do by now without a second thought.)

is because there is no reason to believe that those statements are any more true than the lies they did choose to tell. Saying those particular things isn't about "the truth" it's about damage control. You could make a case that it might be a better strategy, but it certainly wouldn't be more honest.






digby 3/30/2004 01:35:00 PM |

Monday, March 29, 2004

 
Tide Fool

Maureen Dowd quotes Junior saying:

I made the choice to defend the security of the country. You can't see what you think is a threat and hope it goes away. You used to could when the oceans protected us. But the lesson of September 11th is, is when the president sees a threat we must deal with it before it comes to fruition, through death, on our own soils, for example.

Setting aside the supreme irony of his comments about hoping the threat goes away and dealing with it before it comes to fruition (not to mention the atrocious grammar) what is this thing about the oceans protecting us?

My entire childhood, indeed my entire life, was spent under the cloud of a possible nuclear attack. I lived in Kansas for a time as a child during the 60's where my father worked on the missile silos. We did duck and cover drills twice a day. I had nightmares for years about being incinerated like the Japanese at Hiroshima from the instructional movies they showed in my elementary school.

We lived for more than 40 years in this country under the threat of TOTAL ANNIHILATION. It was a real possibility that the entire world would end in a nuclear holocaust. We even came damned close to finding out in October of 1962.

So spare me this melodrama about our shores being penetrated for the very first time as if we were a bunch of naive virgins until terrorists slammed into the WTC. We've lived with far worse threats than this to our "homeland." 9/11 did not change anything in that regard.



digby 3/29/2004 02:26:00 PM |

 
First Impressions

I was going to write a sort of impressionistic review of Clarke's book today while I stew a bit in the information contained therein.

I find that Tristero already did it and did it much more clearly and evocatively than I could.



digby 3/29/2004 01:40:00 PM |

 
In His Own Words

Tim: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: "On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. 'Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness -- and anxiety -- against imminent terrorist attack."

Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?

Clarke: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it
was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."

Now, when he said that in December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999 in the White House Situation Room, with the FBI director, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the head of the Defense Department, and they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.

digby 3/29/2004 12:59:00 PM |

 
Shameless

Frankly, a lot of us didn't take terrorism seriously enough before 9/11, so I'm not sure there's any great shame in all this. Still, the Bush White House should quit smearing Clarke and own up to the truth: terrorism wasn't a top priority during their first few months in office. 9/11 was a wakeup call for them, just as it was for the rest of the country.

Kevin Drum keeps taking that position and I don't understand it. According to all the people who Kevin cites in his post as backing up Clarke, the Clinton administration took terrorism much more seriously. And you don't have to rely on the "impressions" of civil servants because actual real world results show even to those of us not privy to the classified documents that the Clinton team had terrorism as a top priority. They did, after all, thwart the millenium plots.

Even according to Kevin himself in a previous post:

Clarke surely knows that it would have helped his credibility if he had treated the Clinton and Bush administrations more evenhandedly, but he obviously thought the differences between them ran too deep to do that. During the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship, but he felt that at least everyone took it seriously and helped to push.

The way he phrases that leads me to believe that he may not completely share Clarke's view. Or perhaps he's internalized the old political saw that says there's not a dimes worth of difference between the parties or something. In any case, credibility is not determined by some phony "even handedness." This man's credibility rests on his history as a nonpartisan career civil servant and the facts and witnesses that back up his claims.

As kevin notes he does not say that Clinton was a one man terrorist wrecking crew. He and everybody else were slow off the mark as the terrorist threat emerged in the mid 90's. But, it is indisputable that by January of 2001 the professional national security establishment KNEW that al Qaeda was a huge threat and within months they were warning of a major attack. Unlike Clinton two years before (and from whom they could have learned a thing or two) the Bush team chose to keep their fingers crossed rather than raise the issue to the top of their list of priorities.

Our bi-partisan tradition of foreign policy has meant that a new administration depends upon career civil servants like Clarke to keep national security running smoothly over changes of parties in the White House. They are non-partisan for that reason. He and others had made forward progress in getting the Clinton administration to make terrorism a priority and it was naturally expected that once it had hit the top of the threat food chain it would stay there until it was either defeated or proved to be mistaken. You just don't drop national security threat assessments for partisan ideological reasons.

That is what happened. The Bush team ignored the warnings of the Clinton appointees and they also ignored the warnings of the permanent national security establishment, all of whom had experienced the rise of the terrorist threat during the preceding eight years and who were not kidding when they warned them about it.

Clarke admits that we will never know if we could have prevented 9/11, but it is clear that if the Clinton administration (and probably the Gore administration) had been in office during the summer of 2001, they would have treated the intelligence they received more seriously. It is shameful that the Bush administration failed to take the threat of terrorism at least as seriously as the previous administration did and it is even more shameful that they have resisted any attempts to change the way they do business, as amply illustrated by their misguided adventure in Iraq.

They are not responsible for 9/11, but they most certainly are responsible for the mistakes they made leading up to it. They should feel some shame for not having having taken the advice of those who warned them. That's what that whole "grown-up" thing was supposed to be about.


Liberal Oasis has more on this topic

And for some serious "evenhanded" pooh-poohing about "futile recriminations" and 9/11's inevitability, Gregg Easterbrook takes the cake:

It has taken two and a half years to get to the carnival of futile recriminations about September 11, 2001, but we're now at that point, and it's time for the futile recriminations to stop. No one, Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, knew September 11 was coming. Looking back, all that matters is what was said before September 11, not afterward, and, while many before that day offered generalized cautions about terrorism, no one made a firm warning about what actually happened. That's because no one knew what was coming.

Easterbrooks' straw man is very smug, but he's wrong. Nobody says that there was perfect information that was ignored. But we know that there were dots that could have been connected as Colleen Rowley and other in the FBI prove. Clarke, the consummate bureaucrat, says that the way to get the behemoth federal government to move on an urgent issue is to shake the trees from the top down and flush the information to the top. The Bush team refused to do that. He believes that it may have been possible to put together some of the clues that we know existed and take some action. It is simply not true that nothing could have been done.

Perhaps this is one of those cases where believing that something could have been done and wasn't is rejected because it's too bad to be true.



digby 3/29/2004 11:42:00 AM |

 
I Love These Guys

There was a fraction of a moment when no one knew how to react. Outside the Park Plaza Hotel -- where a boisterous crowd of protesters was chanting, beating drums, and bristling with antiwar signs meant for President Bush -- a group of about a dozen approached. They were in ball gowns and suits and drinking champagne. "Bush and Cheney are good for us," they chanted.

"Look at all these liberal hippies coming around with their boo-hoo signs," said one of them, a woman in a silver lame wrap and designer sunglasses.

Some of the protesters turned, stunned. But then someone pointed to the signs the fancy-dresssed group was carrying -- "Free the Enron Seven" and "Corporations are People Too!" -- and the crowd erupted with shouts of approval. "We should let them get up front," somebody shouted, telling the crowd to part and let them pass toward the hotel.

The group is, in fact, part of a well-organized, liberal-leaning protest machine calling itself Billionaires for Bush. With founding members in Massachusetts and New York, it plans to dog the Bush campaign through November, using satire as its gimmick. Staging swanky protests in which they enthusiastically defend tax loopholes for the rich and war contracts for friends of the president, they claim to be winning a loyal following -- donors and members at 25 chapters in several states. And they say they're making a more lasting impression with their anti-Bush message.

[...]

The Billionaires for Bush group is among several activist organizations sprouting up in recent years whose main tactics include humor and irony. "Reverend Billy" and his "Church of Stop Shopping," an anticonsumerism organization, stages church-revival-type rallies with a preacher. Then there is a group that purports to be made up of "housewives" from Bush's hometown of Crawford, Texas, with proverbs such as "A bomb, in time, saves 9" and "A country bribed is an ally earned." The "housewives" have made appearances at Times Square in New York, where they dressed up in red, white, and blue, and straddled plastic missiles.

Proponents say such humor is helping political groups attract younger participants. "This makes it fun, it makes it hip," said Andrew Boyd, "director of high-level schmoozing" for the Billionaires. "It gives it that ironic sensibility, which is a deep current in youth culture. Witness `The Daily Show' and Michael Moore."

It's more than youth culture:

Fake and scathing 1, fair and balanced 0. CNN and MSNBC have gotten used to losing to Fox News. But during the Democratic primaries, an unexpected foe stole the ratings crown from all three. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, a mock news program airing on Viacom's (VIA) Comedy Central, attracted more viewers at 11 p.m. than any of the cable news channels in the last two weeks of January, outdoing Fox by 20 percent even as the news network was running live campaign coverage. Stewart's fake news show has won ever-growing audiences with help from real politico guests like John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards.

Which news is the fake news again?

Thanks to Julia for the link.




digby 3/29/2004 03:16:00 AM |

Sunday, March 28, 2004

 
Woodward and Pincus

Thanks to commenter Pontificator, here's an interesting little follow up to the Bob Woodward item from the great piece by Michael Massing in the NY Review of Books called Now They Tell Us:

In the weeks following the [UN] speech, one journalist—Walter Pincus of The Washington Post—developed strong reservations about it. A longtime investigative reporter, Pincus went back and read the UN inspectors' reports of 1998 and 1999, and he was struck to learn from them how much weaponry had been destroyed in Iraq before 1998. He also tracked down General Anthony Zinni, the former head of the US Central Command, who described the hundreds of weapons sites the United States had destroyed in its 1998 bombing. All of this, Pincus recalled, "made me go back and read Powell's speech closely. And you could see that it was all inferential. If you analyzed all the intercepted conversations he discussed, you could see that they really didn't prove anything."

By mid-March, Pincus felt he had enough material for an article questioning the administration's claims on Iraq. His editors weren't interested. It was only after the intervention of his colleague Bob Woodward, who was researching a book on the war and who had developed similar doubts, that the editors agreed to run the piece—on page A17.

The White House is right to be worried.

reading this reminded me of a post I wrote last July:

Is it possible that there are no WMD in Iraq today because Bill Clinton led a coalition of the willing and disarmed Saddam Hussein 5 years ago?

We wouldn't want to let an idea like that take hold, now would we?




digby 3/28/2004 09:52:00 PM |

 
Total Incoherence

White House officials strongly dispute Clarke's conclusion, saying it reflects an old-fashioned approach to dealing with terrorism. "Those who question Iraq have an outdated and one-dimensional view of what is really a multi-dimensional threat to our nation," said Jim Wilkinson deputy national security adviser for communications. "Some think the solution is to kill Osama bin Laden, finish Afghanistan and then go back to a defensive posture and hope we're not attacked again. This approach represents the old way of thinking because it ignores the fact that the modern terrorist threat is a global threat."

Clarke's Critique Reopens Debate on Iraq War (washingtonpost.com)

Fixed link
digby 3/28/2004 09:12:00 AM |

Saturday, March 27, 2004

 
Another Shoe?

Tucker Carlson said on Matthews' weekly show tonight that the White House is worried about Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack which chronicles the lead up to the Iraq War. Carlson said they were worried about Powell using this book to distance himself from the neocon crazies.

Now, this is Tucker talking and this is Woodward and Powell we are talking about, so there's no point in expecting anything earthshattering. However, it will not help them if this book has Powell arguing with Rummy, Wolfie and Cheney on Iraq or shows Condi clueless or has the president being led around by the nose on the WMD threat. (Powell wasn't exactly toeing the Party line with enthusiasm yesterday.)

I doubt Woodward is going to be the same drooling sycophant he was with Bush At War because he took a lot of shit for it and risked ruining his journalistic reputation forever. Besides,Woodward's always been a trendie. When it was in to worship Bush, he was there to lead the prayer but he may find it more profitable to be skeptical this time. He must have known that Clarke and O'Neill were writing books, too. It would be embarrassing to be too gushing this time.

Whether it breaks any new ground or not, I don't think it can possibly be good for them to have people discussing this in May. The book is due out on April 30th.





digby 3/27/2004 06:58:00 PM |

 
The Violent Dems

Ezra comments on Insty's post about the shocking political hate speech emanating from the left and the horrible, horrible violence and impending totalitarianism running rampant in the Democratic party. Excuse me, I have to loosen my corset. I can hardly breathe I'm so upset about it.

Insty says:

Something I never wanted to believe seems to be playing out daily: the Democratic party has been overrun by totalitarians. The party is marginalizing old-guard Dems who might (might!) hold differing opinions but who also could be counted on for civility and a rational basis for their arguments. . . .There is no room for dissent, discourse, debate. My experience is that people behave this way when they hold indefensible beliefs, and they know just how weak their position is. A dog with this behavior is called a "fear-biter" and I can think of no better description for these people.

Somebody bring me a shot of laudenum and a mint julep. I'm feeling one of my fevahs comin' on!

Ezra intelligently rebuts Insty's hysteria in his inimitable fashion:

There are debates going on here everday. This whole exchange is taking place in a medium that consists almost entirely of debates between the Left and the Right! The context of this is a presidential election in which the Democrat is running slightly ahead of Bush and has been proving day in and day out that our ideas are more than defensible, they are quite suited to offense as well. And through all this, the Right has remained dependent on character attacks rather than the invocation of a less-than-stellar record.

[...]

The idea that our arguments and ideas are indefensible is patently ridiculous. Yet Glenn repeats it anyway, highlighting an argument accusing Democrats of being totalitarians unable to rationally support their arguments. And somewhere the truth sits, crying in the corner, wondering why Glenn insists upon abusing it so.

Just so. But, aren't Republicans (and their useful idiot libertarian supporters) getting more and more, you know, weak these days? As in flabby, flaccid, whiny, ineffectual, weepy and emasculated? They can't seem to handle any kind of adversity without resorting to shrieks of maidenly finger pointing saying "you sirrah, are no gentleman!" They strut around, their codpieces stuffed with sock-puppets, name calling, hurling insults, verbally assaulting anybody who disagrees with them and when somebody gets fed up and turns it back on them they quiver like a herd of frightened deer and claim that their adversaries are mean and greedy and just plain icky.

Now, I expect pacifists like nuns and priests and vegans to decry physical violence under all circumstances. Indeed, I myself think that violence at political events is never a good thing and I don't condone it. But, I probably wouldn't expect to avoid it if I baited and insulted a bunch of great big thugs who hold a different political point of view. That's just the way the world works. I thought the Republican-kill-the-bastards-quick-hand-me-your-AK47 freepers knew all that, but apparently not.

Our self-proclaimed steely eyed tough guys may spend a lot of time playing one handed Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance but they don't seem to have much real life follow through. They certainly don't follow a stupid macho edict like "never complain, never explain" these days, what with all their weeping and wailing. Why, there used to be a time when they would have been embarrassed to admit to something like this ...

Can we really trust American security to these little t-ball players playing dress up in Daddy's uniform? I don't think so. They aren't tough and they aren't smart. Big problem.





If you'd like to see the way in which this poor 'lil fella sees the people who took a shot at him, check his picture page which features the description of people at the rally as mindless thugs, dykes, pillow biters and bench rats. I don't know if he called one of those teamster fellas one of those names to his face, but if he did it may fall into the category of fighting words.



digby 3/27/2004 03:16:00 PM |

Friday, March 26, 2004

 
Scumsucking Pig


Avedon Carol led me to this comment on Electrolite about Richard Clarke's apology:

Anybody who has been paying attention to these hearings will know that all of the witnesses have started their testimony with a lengthy statement explaining this or that about their role in the lead up to 9/ll, much of it self-justifying, much of it saying, well, you know, we were busy with other stuff. So on and so forth.

Mr. Clarke did otherwise. His statement was brief and to the point.

He made a heart-felt apology to the American people for failing to stop 9/ll. He said he did his best. He said a lot of people did their best. But in the end, it didn't matter because they had failed the American people, most especially the victims, and the families of the victims who died on 9/11.

The members victim's families who were in the room broke into applause.

I stared at the screen shocked.

And then I, yep, I will admit it here: I started crying.

Well, that's nice and all, but I think Senator Frist has something to say about that:

In his appearance before the 9-11 Commission, Mr. Clarke's theatrical apology on behalf of the nation was not his right, his privilege or his responsibility. In my view it was not an act of humility, but an act of supreme arrogance and manipulation. Mr Clarke can and will answer for his own conduct but that is all.

And to all of the 9/11 families, Dr. Frist added, "Fuck you."

This is one of those moments where I want to put my foot through the TV. The chutzpah, the nerve, the unalloyed balls of these cowardly little fucks makes me very, very angry. I need to take a little walk.



digby 3/26/2004 03:56:00 PM |

 
Boiling It Down To One Simple Image

Via TAPPED

Richard Clarke: "...we were readying for a principals' meeting in July, but the principals' calendar was full, and then they went on vacation, many of them, in August, so we couldn't meet in August, and therefore the principals met in September."


According to a CBS piece on presidential vacations:

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, The Manchester Guardian calculated that Mr. Bush, in his first seven months of office spent 42 percent of his time on holiday, "a whopping 54 days at his Texas ranch, 38 days at the presidential retreat at Camp David and four more at his parents' place in Kennebunkport, Maine."

Hardworking Americans understand why this might have been a problem. The guy was a lazy bastard from the get-go.




digby 3/26/2004 03:20:00 PM |

 
Official Minutes Of The MSNBC Junior Varsity Girls Cheerleading Try-outs


Oh my Gawd, like Democrats are like such total geeks, dude. It's like totally funny to watch them all get together and like act like they're sooo kewl --- NOT! I'm soo shurr. We are sooo much kewler. And cuter, too.

MATTHEWS: ... There are the presidents all walking out on the stage, Jimmy Carter, behind him, Bill Clinton. Boy, it‘s an unusual picture here. I guess it is not exactly Mount Rushmore, but it‘s all the Democrats have this time.

Here they come. There‘s John Kerry looking great, dark hair. I love it when they point at people.

We‘re sitting here with Howard Fineman and Karen Tumulty of TIME magazine. Howard is of course with Newsweek and with us.

You know, it‘s amazing. What is this where they all do this? They walk out. Karen, they do this all the time. They go and they go like this. And golike, what is that about? They see like they see some old buddy in the audience? What is that?

HOWARD FINEMAN, NBC CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It is a way to establish intimacy. Hey, I see you. We‘ve known each other forever. You‘re not just here as a contributor. You did not just give $1,000 to get here. We grew up together. We went to school together.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I‘m stunned by the three the three pictured.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Jimmy Carter can‘t stand Bill Clinton. They‘re doing a little oh, talk about disliking each other.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Anybody Karen, you‘ve got a moment here. Does anybody on that stage like anybody else?

(LAUGHTER)

KAREN TUMULTY, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, TIME: That‘s a very good question.

MATTHEWS: Like anyone else? Try to do a permutation here. Howard, you‘re good at this.

FINEMAN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Permutations. Oh, Terry McAuliffe. Well, he likes Bill Clinton. Those two like each other. Any president like any other president or vice president?

(CROSSTALK)

FINEMAN: Clinton and Carter don‘t particularly like each other.

MATTHEWS: Howard Dean and John Kerry are not too close.

FINEMAN: Yes.

TUMULTY: I wonder how things are between Gore and Dean these days.

FINEMAN: Now Gore now, Al Gore was not originally supposed to be in the original shot.

MATTHEWS: Right.

FINEMAN: But he managed to do a pretty good job of getting in there as the almost president.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Almost.

(LAUGHTER)

FINEMAN: As the guy who got more...

MATTHEWS: There‘s Dick Gephardt.

FINEMAN: ... popular votes. So he was pretty instantly in the instant Mount Rushmore up there. This is a symbol...

MATTHEWS: Is that Al Sharpton there? Yes, it is Al Sharpton.

FINEMAN: There you go.

(CROSSTALK)

TUMULTY: I don‘t know. They all look like flight attendants for the same airline.

(CROSSTALK)

FINEMAN: Now, there is Bill Clinton with John Edwards, which is significant only because Edwards keeps claiming that Clinton is his big supporter in the vice presidential hunt.

MATTHEWS: Is that Charlie Rangel? Who is the guy on the left? I just thought it was an odd picture.

TUMULTY: That was Sharpton, wasn‘t it?

MATTHEWS: Was that Sharpton?

(CROSSTALK)

FINEMAN: I think that was Al Sharpton.

MATTHEWS: Was it really?

TUMULTY: And somebody didn‘t give them memo that this was not black tie. So...

MATTHEWS: Maybe that‘s the suit he has got clean this week.

(LAUGHTER)

[...]

TUMULTY: Yes, not Kerry. He is having more fun now.

MATTHEWS: What about Gore and Clinton? That‘s a recent injury to

both. I mean, Gore jumps into the campaign forthere we go. Watch

this. We‘re watching this right now. There‘s Gore

(CROSSTALK)

FINEMAN: See, now, that was very carefully choreographed.

MATTHEWS: That was the quickest one.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: How fast did Gore get past Clinton there?

TUMULTY: I didn‘t see any eye contact there.

MATTHEWS: How fast?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: He is about to give him a high-five.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No response to that high-five.

FINEMAN: You know, what the thought balloons are there is, Gore is thinking, if it hadn‘t been for that guy, I would have won this election. And Clinton with a thought balloon is thinking, you dummy. How could you have blown that election that I set up for you?

MATTHEWS: Oh, God, and this sort of practiced hand clapping. Most people don‘t clap like that. They clap like this.

FINEMAN: That‘s the Democratic clap. Don‘t you agree, Karen?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... an official clap.

(CROSSTALK)

FINEMAN: Democrats stand up on the stage and clap.

MATTHEWS: It is official clapping.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: And then they really want to go like this up on top of their heads when they‘re really enthusiastic.

TUMULTY: Well, you remember, though, when Al Gore was running, somebody actually had to coach him on clapping.

MATTHEWS: Really?

TUMULTY: That is a true story. Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: How was he doing it wrong?

FINEMAN: Like Herman Munster. It was...

MATTHEWS: I don‘t think he was doing the back beat handshake, do you?

I think he was probably doing the front beat.

Gag me with a weapon of mass destruction.





digby 3/26/2004 12:21:00 PM |

 
Lowering The Veil

Via Reuters:

Political consultants and analysts said Clarke's allegation that Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11 attacks and was obsessed by a desire to invade Iraq were especially damaging because they confirmed other previous revelations from policy insiders.

"Each of these revelations adds to the others so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the message gets reinforced with voters," said Richard Rosecrance, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

[...]

"The administration can huff and puff but if there are enough bricks in the structure, they can't blow the house down any more," said American University historian Allan Lichtman.

"Right now, you have quite a number of bricks. It's not just scaffolding any more," he said.

[...]

"Bush has chosen national security and his response to the terrorist attack as a cornerstone of his campaign and now comes this guy Clarke, their guy, who says that the administration was intentionally or unintentionally not paying enough attention to the terrorist threat," said Rick Davis, a Republican political consultant.

[...]

"If people start to doubt that claim and if the message from Clarke and O'Neill and others begins to stick, it would seriously weaken Bush on his strongest point," said Fordham University political scientist Tom DeLuca.

The administration response has usually been to try to destroy the reputations of its critics. It suggested O'Neill had illegally used classified documents and said he was motivated by sour grapes after having been forced to resign from the Cabinet. A Treasury probe has cleared him of misusing documents.

Similarly, White House aides said Clarke was bitter about having been denied a promotion and "out of the loop" in the administration. They also said he was a closet Democrat working as a proxy for Bush's presidential opponent, John Kerry.

"This administration has shown a tremendous ability to demonize its opponents. But at some point, people start to ask themselves, could all these people be pathological liars? At some point, they can't all be liars," said Democratic consultant Michael Goldman.

Billmon thinks:

Now that Against All Enemies has gone into its fifth printing, and the 9/11 commission hearings have generated a huge amount of press coverage -- and, judging from the anecdotal evidence, a fair amount of kitchen table and coffee break conversation as well -- it looks like the events of the past week may be evolving into something much more significant than just another political mud fight.

I agree that with Clarke's charges, aside from the fact that they were very effectively delivered by a very credible source, the central complaint about the Bush administration is finally reaching critical mass. There was the outing of Valerie Plame, the phony Jessica Lynch story, the AWOL charges, Paul O'Neill's book, Halliburton corruption, the strong arming of the Richard Foster and much more, all layering upon the other until it's impossible to ignore the idea that there might be something to all this. And, of course, there is the humongous elephant in the middle of the room --- the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. That alone is such an enormous, jarring failure, especially in light of the unspeakably arrogant way in which they told the rest of the world to shove it, that all these other things can no longer be shoved aside.

The air of desperation in the furious character assassination of Clarke actually plays into that concept. They are rattled and it shows.

In the piece linked above, Billmon comments on the rather strange (and unprecedented) national sense of denial after 9/11, which I think is an important element of the George W. Bush mystique:

One of the things I found most remarkable about 9/11 -- at least when compared to past national traumas like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor -- was how willing the American public was to put questions of responsibility and accountability out of mind, seemingly indefinitely.

I think the reason for this is that subconsciously most people did not really believe that George W. Bush was capable of leading the country through a serious national security crisis. In order to keep from panicking, they simply went into denial. It's a natural reaction in a situation over which you have very little control.

There was nothing particularly inspiring about Bush standing on the rubble saying "The people who knocked down these buildings are going to hear all of us soon." (It was hardly "we have nothing to fear but fear itself.") People just knew that they had no choice but to put their faith in this shallow fellow and so they did.

Deep down, everyone has always feared that this inarticulate son of a failed president was not up to the job. It's been the undercurrent of his entire life. One of his strongest selling points was that he would bring "the grown-ups" back into government. Nobody ever thought he was one of them. He himself said on Oprah in the 2000 campaign that "the public's biggest misconception of him is that 'I'm running on my daddy's name.'"

But a politician can't be tarred with something that isn't believable. One of the reasons that most of the public didn't give a damn about corruption charges against Clinton was that he had no money. It never made sense that a smart guy like him would have been corrupt without getting rich. Yet, most believed immediately that he'd strayed with Monica. They simply didn't find such a personal matter relevant to his job as president.

Bush's appearance on Meet The Press a few weeks ago was a disaster. His public statements are increasingly annoying in their stale and repetitive rhetoric. Loyal civil servants are coming forward and complaining about the errors, lies and thuggish tactics that the Bush administrtation is perpetrating. Nothing seems to be working.

And, deep down, the American people are not surprised. With more than three years to go and a national security crisis on their hands they closed their eyes and held on for dear life, hoping against hope that he would rise to the occasion. He didn't, despite all the phony media hooplah that insisted he was Churchill in ermine and epaulets. We are now only eight months away from our first chance to replace him with someone more capable. People are starting to let go of their desperate need to believe.

The veil is being lowered because it finally feels safe to do so.



digby 3/26/2004 10:50:00 AM |

Thursday, March 25, 2004

 
He Was Right

Mark Kleiman says:

In a world dominated by uncertainty, having made a correct prediction is no proof of having had the right underlying model. Maybe the guy who was right when almost everyone else was wrong just drew to an inside straight. And of course every bureaucrat thinks his political masters would have been well-advised to take his expertise more seriously than they did.

Still, the past performance sheet has to count for something. Someone who got something important right when most other people didn't deserves to be listened to. And those who didn't listen to him before he was proven right by events can legitimately be asked whether their refusal to do so was a mistake.

Every single person who is called upon to defend Richard Clarke should just say, "He was right, wasn't he?"

It's really that simple. He said it was going to happen, nobody believed him and it happened. He's not the one with a credibility problem.




digby 3/25/2004 09:47:00 PM |

 
Random Observations

Bill Clinton was great at the Democratic Unity dinner. He was smart, funny, self-deprecating and even a bit inspiring.

His words about Kerry, in which he wove the story of Kerry's life as a series of missions for which he volunteered was just excellent. When the going gets tough, John Kerry says, "send me." From Kerry's Vietnam heroism (which Clinton deftly framed in contrast to the current president, the current vice president and himself) to his fight for kids on the streets, he praised him for volunteering for the tough assignment. And then he asked that the members of the Party go to John Kerry and say, "send me." It was perfect for the zeitgeist of the moment.

I was struck by the music that was used for these guys, too. Clinton's upbeat, optimistic "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" has been replaced by Kerry's "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. This election is all about balls.

Also...

I am really kind of stunned that Bush is making jokes about not being able to find the WMD. That the entire press corps laughed like a bunch of would be sorority girls during pledge week doesn't surprise me.

On the other hand, if the patriotic correctness police have been dismissed then fine with me. Up until recently you couldn't ask for a glass of water in a restaurant without prefacing it with "I support the troops." "The War" was sacred. Even here in Soviet Monica people were flying flags right along side their "War Is Not The Answer" bumper sticker. If the Republicans are abandoning their position as the steely eyed and serious national security grown-ups, I'm all for it.

We've got a few guys who are more than ready to step in and fix this goddamned mess.




digby 3/25/2004 09:36:00 PM |

 
And Don't Forget T-Ball

Politus has a great post up about Bush's urgent priorities before September 11th.

Yeah, he was focused on terrorism all right.

Before the events of September 11, 2001, Bush had signed 24 executive orders. How many of them dealt with counterterrorism?

In his first month in office Bush threw a bone to the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons by setting up the vehicle to give them boatloads of taxpayer money. No time for counterterrorism in January:


Jan 29. Establish Office of Faith Based Initiatives (Remember that?)

Jan 29. Require federal agencies to establish their own Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

February was whack-a-union month. No time for counterterrism in February either, unless you consider union members to be terrorists. Bush and the Low-Wage Republicans may think union members are terrorists, but the focus was on bin Laden, right?

Feb 12. Extend life of President’s Information Technology Committee

Feb 21. Dissolves Labor-Management Partnerships

Feb 21. Dissolves a labor-friendly executive order, allowing new contractors to fire everybody and hire scabs

Feb 21. Requires contractors to display anti-union messages

Feb 21. Encourage the use of non-union contractors

Bush couldn’t be bothered with any stinkin’ counterterrorism executive orders in March, either. The unions were causing trouble for his boys at American Airlines and something had to be done:


Mar 9. Establish an “Emergency Board” to interfere in the Mechanics Union strike against American Airlines

Likewise for April. The pesky bin Laden guy could wait ‘til next month. There was more union busting to do, and Hispanic voters needed to know that Bush was really worried about the Status of Puerto Rico:


Apr 4. Perfunctory termination of export controls

Apr 5. Slight change in pay for government employees working abroad

Apr 6. Exempt certain contractors from some requirements to hire union workers

Apr 30. Extend the President’s Task Force on the Status of Puerto Rico

Now we are up to May, when the terrorist chatter picked up by intelligence was spiking. Clarke and Tenet knew something was coming, and Clark was nearly apoplectic in his warnings. So, did Bush finally focus his administration on bin Laden, signing an executive order to that effect? No… May is the month for Social Security Privatization and phat payback to his oily buddies:


May 2. Create President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, the first step toward privatization

May 18. Actions to Expedite Energy-Related Projects, fast track for environmental rapers and scrapers

May 18. Ditto, for Big Energy supply and distribution

May 23. Prohibit import of rough diamonds from Liberia

May 28. President's Task Force to Improve Health Care Delivery for Our Nation's Veterans, a sham committee to look for ways to improve the VA

Terrorist chatter from intelligence intercepts was at a crescendo in June of 2001, yet Bush was focused on the “compassionate” part of his resume, after spending the last few months working on the “conservative” part. But not a peep about UBL or terrorism:


Jun 1. Very slight changes to the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee

Jun 6. Extend by 2 years initiatives to Increase Participation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Federal Programs

Jun 19. Community-based Alternatives for Individuals with Disabilities

Jun 20. 21st Century Workforce Initiative; as if the Clinton boom was going to last forever

In July Bush was getting ready for his month-long vacation in Crawfish, and mumbling about “vampire” cellular phone power supplies. Wasn’t Usama bin Laden at least as important to his administration as trade with Belarus?


Jul 2. Waiving anti-communist trade restrictions against Belarus

Jul 31. Requiring government agencies to purchase energy efficient power supplies for things like cellular phones

August in Crawfish is too frikkin’ hot to think about terrorists:

Aug 17. Perfunctory extension of the cold war-era Export Control Act

This was the last executive order Bush signed before 9/11. Even though he and his lackeys now claim they were consumed with UBL and counterterrorism was a top priority to them, there is not a peep of any of that in any of the documents Bush signed to set the direction and functioning of his government. And then?

September 11.

At which point he decided to invade a country that had nothing to do with terrorism, destroy half a century of alliances and alienate the entire world.


digby 3/25/2004 06:47:00 PM |

 
Shaking The Trees

Fred Kaplan writes another fine article in Slate today about Richard Clarke. He again notes Clarke's legendary reputation as a brilliant bureaucratic infighter as he did in his first piece on the subject a couple of days ago. This skill is mentioned frequently by those in Washington who know Clarke.

Clarke demonstrated his insight into the process with this statement on Larry King Live last night:

CLARKE: Well, we'll never know. But let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.

Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two -- if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two. Would that have stopped...

Michael Isikoff added this on the subject later in the show:

I do want to say, though, on the question of -- I was struck -- the most fascinating thing that Clarke said, to me, during the hearings today was he laid out a scenario by which -- actually, a plausible one, by which September 11 could have been prevented if there had been the kind of urgency to the issue that he thought it could be. And that was, we did know. The government did know. The CIA knew and the FBI late in August knew that two of the hijackers -- Nawaf al Hazmi (ph), Khalid al Midar (ph) -- were inside the United States. Two suspected al Qaeda operatives were inside the country. Yet there was no concerted government attempt to find these guys. There was a late bulletin from the FBI.

What Clarke suggested he would have done -- he says he would like to think he would have done, had he known about this, was an all-out public manhunt. Put these guys' pictures all over the place, "America's Most Wanted," have their pictures in the paper. And had that been done, which does sound like a plausible thing that could have been done, it might at least have deterred those two guys...

KING: Yes.

ISIKOFF: ... from getting on the planes, and it might well have disrupted the plot. It's the first time I've heard a plausible scenario by which the government could have taken the little information it did have and actually stopped the plot.

KING: Putting their pictures where everybody gets on board an airplane.

I think that this is a very interesting insight. Clarke, a 30 year veteran of the government and one who has a fierce reputation for cutting through the bureaucracy to get things done, says that the way to deal with an urgent national security threat is to force the issue to the top of the agenda by having the president personally lean on the cabinet heads to "shake the trees" in their own bureaucracies. That makes sense to me. When people are called to account by the boss on a certain issue they turn up the heat on their underlings. It's human nature and its certainly been my experience in the workplace.

And, he says that if that had been done in the spring and summer of 2001, when by all accounts there was a lot of intelligence that something "big" was about to happen, it's entirely possible that some of the "dots" would have been connected before they blew up the world trade center and the pentagon.

Clarke himself says that we will never know if we could have uncovered or disrupted the plot, but certainly it is clear that the system he describes in the Clinton administration was successful previously in disrupting the millenium bombing plot. That should count for something.

But, the bigger issue, I think, is that this illustrates once again what a grave mistake it is to have a president who is arrogant yet intellectually incurious and whose inexperience in life and government makes him manipulable by others. Clarke had previously worked for Reagan who was surrounded by highly professional foreign policy realists and Bush Sr who was a highly professional foreign policy realist himself. With Clinton he found a nimble, intelligent thinker who was open to new ideas and methods for dealing with post cold war threats and who was accessible and personally engaged in the decision making process.

But, George W. Bush was an inexperienced and overly protected executive with little personal depth and too much faith in a cabal of neocon radicals. He relied on an intellectually weak staff whose main job was to create unnecessary layers of bureaucracy to protect their boss from difficult problems. These layers of bureaucracy insulated him from the important issues of the day and made it impossible even for a brilliant bureaucrat like Clarke to cut through the maze and convince the ossified Iraq obsessives to look up from their dusty PNAC wish-lists and deal with the terrible threat we faced right that very minute.

The failure stemmed directly from the president because he is not in charge. No organization works under that kind of leadership much less a sophisticated bureaucracy. The system completely broke down under the effect of no real leadership, competing agendas and focus in the wrong direction.

The Bush administration's image of competence and cool collected professionalism is completely phony. From DiUllio to O'Neill to Clarke we see first hand that this is a highly dysfunctional White House, one that spends much more time on politics than policy and that is philosophically incoherent and at constant war with itself. It has been reduced to issuing thuggish threats of reprisal to any civil servant who insists upon doing his job. The president is hardly more than a public relations flack, his national security advisor is a cipher, his various cabinet departments are wholly owned subsidiaries of special interests, he's been completely manipulated by a radical Vice President and a slightly insane Secretary of Defense and his economic policy has been entirely directed toward short term political ends. And yet, amazingly, in virtually every single action it has taken, his administration has failed spectacularly.

In light of this we really need to let go of this "well, these things happen," attitude and recognize that we have been duped into thinking that 9/11 could not have been prevented. Clearly, it could have. Other plots were thwarted and they were thwarted because the government focused attention on it and directed its resources toward that end.

It is true that the bigger question of how badly Bush dealt with the issue of terrorism AFTER 9/11 is probably a more potent campaign issue, because the results of going into Iraq are still fresh and easily observable. But, after listening to Dick Clarke for the last few days and beginning to read through is book, I am convinced that Bush dropped the ball.

But then, it was entirely predictable that he would drop the ball because he was never qualified to be president and that lack of qualification led him to make very poor choices in advisors and very poor judgements about the nation's priorities.

The bigger lesson in all of this, and one which I'm sure will go inheeded by many, is that you should not elect stupid people to the presidency. Smart ones can screw up, but it's not guaranteed that they will. But, a stupid yet arrogant president is bound to fail. The job is just too complicated for someone like that.


Update: Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias discuss the related topic of Condi Rice's obvious lack of proper qualifications for the job of NSA under the current circumstances.




digby 3/25/2004 02:14:00 PM |

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

 
Potent



Former U.S. counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke hugs and greets family members of victims of the September 11 attacks following testimony before a national commission investigating the attacks on Capitol Hill March 24, 2004. Clarke, a senior adviser to Bush and the three previous administrations, has accused Bush of paying insufficient attention to the al-Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and afterward focusing on Iraq (news - web sites) at the expense of efforts to crush the network. REUTERS/Win McNamee. Via Catch.com

From Billmon:

If you watched Clarke today, you now have a pretty good idea of why the administration and the VRWC wind machine are so terrified of him. If anything, he was even more effective than he was on 60 Minutes. From his opening statement (a simple, but eloquent, apology for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks) to his final answer to the final question, he was absolutely calm, completely lucid and utterly authoritative.

Clarke simply rolled over his only aggressive challenger -- former Illinois Governor Jim Thompson -- reducing him to not much more than a greasy spot on the pavement. Thompson (who should have known better) made the strategic blunder of nailing his inquisitorial flag to a transcript ofa background briefing that Clarke gave in the summer of 2002, which was leaked to Fox News by the White House and released just hours before he testified.

In that briefing, Clarke supposedly lauded the administration's conduct of the war against terrorism in words which were not exactly consistent with the picture painted in his new book.

But the ploy backfired on Big Jim after Clarke refused to play the role of evasive double talker (Kerry could learn a lot from him.) He didn't back down an inch. The briefing, Clarke replied, was simply an exercise in spin doctoring -- "maximizing the positives and minimizing the negatives" -- as he had been instructed to do by his political superiors. It was also no different, he said, from simliar background briefings he had conducted for previous presidents. Clarke managed to make it very clear he didn't just mean Clinton. And every member of the commission, and every reporter in the room, knew exactly what he meant.

Thompson decided he didn't want to go there.

[...]

John Lehman, Reagan's former Tailhook, I mean, Navy Secretary, was a much more subtle. If Big Jiim went after Clarke with a sledge hammer, Lehman tried a straight razor -- first him lathering up with praise (he called Clarke the "Rosetta Stone" of understanding 9/11) and then trying to slice open his jugular by implying that Clarke's book was at odds with his private testimony before the commission.

But Clarke ducked the blade with ease, simply noting that much of his criticism of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism record related to its obsession with Iraq -- something the commission had not even asked him about in private session.

Fred Fielding took a crack next, and tried impeaching Clarke for his testimony before the sham congressional 9/11 investigation. But Clarke again fell back on the Bush administration's usual standard of official conduct in such situations: He didn't lie to the congressional panel, he said, he just used his supply of candor judiciously. Fielding was left muttering about the "integrity" that public officials should show in their jobs -- this from Richard Nixon's Watergate lawyer!

[...]

But I don't think the base is their big problem now -- it's the middle, the mainstream, even (or especially) the mainstream media, which has been forced by today's testimony to award Clarke the legitimacy it has denied to other administration critics, even Paul O'Neill. Now they'll expect the White House to give them the steak, not just the sizzle. They're going to demand more serious answers. So far, though the administration has shown no sign it thinks it can hold its own in that kind of debate.

digby 3/24/2004 08:33:00 PM |

 
Attack Dogs Go Rabid

"By invading Iraq the President has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Well, it doesn't get any more stark than that. When he said it, you could hear a pin drop in the hearing room. Reminded me of when I was just a pup listening to the Watergate hearings and John Dean uttered his famous "cancer on the presidency" line. (Fred Fielding and Richard Ben-Veniste were even there.)

Wolf Blitzer thinks, however, that the FOXNEWS "backrounder" released by the White House totally undermines Clarke's case and Peter Bergen agrees. He says that some of the stuff about Iraq might still be worth thinking about, but well...Clarke's pretty much a lying piece of shit.

When asked in the hearings about whether it was moral to put the best face on an administration you work for when briefing the press, Clark said:

"I don't think it's a question of morality at all. I think it's a question of politics." [big applause]

That, as we know, is total crap. The Bush administration has always been scrupulously honest with the press in every conceivable way and never, ever would have required that any of its members not tell the press every single problem they had within the administration. Politics is a dirty word to republicans. It's all about honor and integrity.

Now, Wolf reports that the administration is claiming Clarke has "problems" in his personal life, although they don't say what those things might be. Check Drudge frequently. The real shit is about to start flying.




digby 3/24/2004 02:28:00 PM |

 
Tough Guys

I don't know the real reason they refuse to let Condi testify (although their "separation of powers" rationale is patent bullshit and unpatriotic, to boot.) I can certainly see a public relations reason why they might have done it, though.

Richard Clarke comes across as a no nonsense, take no prisoners tough guy. Just the kind of guy you'd expect to be in charge of counter terrorism. Condi, however intelligent and articulate she may be, exudes timidity and nervousness in public. The contrast wouldn't be very positive for the Bush administration.

Dick Armitage, on the other hand, is from tough guy central casting. For those people who will just catch a glimpse of this hearing in passing, Armitage looks just as tough as Clarke. As Uncle Karl likes to say, "politics is TV with the sound turned off."




digby 3/24/2004 01:34:00 PM |

 
More on Mylroie and Wolfowitz's Grand Delusions

From the Washington Post - June 5, 2003

Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.

With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here," one senior agency official said yesterday.

[...]

In a signal of administration concern over the controversy, two senior Pentagon officials yesterday held a news conference to challenge allegations that they pressured the CIA or other agencies to slant intelligence for political reasons. "I know of no pressure," said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary for policy. "I know of nobody who pressured anybody."

Feith said a special Pentagon office to analyze intelligence in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not necessarily focus on Iraq but came up with "some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Officials in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill, however, have described the office as an alternative source of intelligence analysis that helped the administration make its case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat.

[...]

Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.

"They were the browbeaters," said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. "In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."

[...]

A senior defense official also defended Wolfowitz's questioning: "Does he ask hard questions? Absolutely. I don't think he was trying to get people to come up with answers that weren't true. He's looking for data and answers and he gets frustrated with a lack of answers and diligence and with things that can't be defended."

A major focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding intelligence to prove a connection between Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center,Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. "I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda," said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. Over the following year, "we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search."

In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie's book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said.

The DIA's Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, "Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America." But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. "The message was, why can't we prove this is right?" said the official.

I hope that members of the newly formed Iraq intelligence failure committee are informed of this Wolfowitz/Mylroie information. The 9/11 committee is charged with only dealing with events leading up to 9/11, so they won't address this particular case of intellectual dysfunction. I would hope that the other would, however. This delusional thinking wasted huge amounts of time because one of the nation's top foreign policy intellectuals turns out to be in thrall of a tin foil hat conspiracy theory. And, that thinking helped lead this country into an unnecessary war that has made this country more vulnerable to its enemies.


Thanks to Antiwar.com for the link.


On TAPPED, Matt Yglesias notes Wolfowitz dancing on the head of a pin as he avoids answering questions about this very thing in the hearings yesterday.


Update: In an amazing moment of Hullabaloo synergy none other than Bob Kerrey seemed to be giving credence to Mylroie and Wolfowitz's apparent beliefs that the '93 WTC attacks were perpetrated by Iraq during Clarke's testimony earlier. Clarke knocked it down very effectively, but I have to wonder just how many people in high places have drunk this noxious kool-aid, anyway?


digby 3/24/2004 11:28:00 AM |

 
Bi-Partisan Putz

I notice that Bob Kerrey is back on his hobby horse today insisting to Sandy Berger that Clinton was a sissy because he didn't declare war on Afghanistan. It must be nice to live in bizarro-utopia where it was possible to persuade the American people and the entire world that the US should unilaterally invade countries based upon the bombing of embassies in africa or a rowboat attack on a warship. And he should have done these things during times of extreme domestic political crisis.

Perhaps Bob doesn't realize that even the honorable and integrity-filled George W. Bush had had a little bit of difficulty persuading large chunks of the planet, including here at home, that it's a good idea to unilaterally invade countries even after 9/11.

Let's review what was really going on during the periods in question:

Read the rest over on The American Street




digby 3/24/2004 09:48:00 AM |

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

 
Fruitcake soaked in Anthrax

Here's Laurie Mylroie on a CNN online chat in October of 2001:

CNN: You believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in both attacks the 1993 and September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Why?

MYLROIE: You can demonstrate to the high legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, which is used for criminal conviction, that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, by showing that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bomb, was an Iraqi intelligence agent. I do that in "Study of Revenge." That bomb, in 1993, aimed to topple the north tower onto the south tower. Eight years later, someone came back and finished the job. Since Iraq was behind the first attack, it is suggestive of the point that Iraq was behind the second attack.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is there any proof at all that Hussein is involved in the anthrax scares?

MYLROIE: There is no proof that Saddam is involved in the anthrax scares, but proof is different from evidence. Proof, according to the dictionary, is conclusive demonstration. Evidence is something that indicates, like your smile is evident of your affection for me. There is evidence that Iraq is behind the anthrax scares. First, it takes a highly sophisticated agency to produce anthrax in the lethal form that was in the letter sent to Senator Daschle. Not many parties can do that. Second, there is an additive in that anthrax, bentonite, which is used to cause the anthrax to not stick together, and float in the air. Iraq is the only party known to have produced anthrax with bentonite.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Should the U.S.take action against Iraq?

MYLROIE: Yes. It is necessary for the United States to take action against Iraq. The 1991 Gulf War never ended. We continue it in the form of an economic siege whose origins lie in the Gulf War. And also, we bomb Iraq on a regular basis, and Saddam continues his part of the war in the form of terrorism. It is unlikely that that anthrax will remain in letters. It is likely that it will be used at some point, for example, in the subway of a city, or in the ventilation system of a U.S. building. Saddam wants revenge against us. He wants to do to the U.S. what we've done to Iraq. One way he can do that is terrorism, particularly biological terrorism.

CHAT PARTICPANT: What is the connection between bin Ladden and Saddam?

MYLROIE: Bin Laden and Hussein work together. The contact between the two was made in the 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan. Iraq intelligence also had a major presence in Sudan then. There were other widely reported contacts between bin Laden and Iraq intelligence, such as in December, 1998 when Farook Hajazi traveled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Hajazi is a senior intelligence officer. Bin Laden provides the ideology, he recruits the foot soldiers, and he provides a smokescreen. Iraqi intelligence provides the direction and training for the terrorism.

CNN: You hold the Clinton administration responsible for Hussein's involvement in all of these attacks. Why?

MYLROIE: Iraq is a difficult problem, and has been since the Gulf War. Many mistakes have been made, because it's inevitable that in human endeavor there are mistakes. Under the Clinton administration, specifically in February 1993 with the first attack on the Trade Center, Clinton dealt with the issue dishonestly. New York FBI believed in 1993 that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. That was accepted by the White House, that New York FBI might well be right. In June, 1993, Clinton attacked Iraqi intelligence headquarters. He said that that was punishment for Saddam's attempt to kill George Bush when Bush visited Kuwait in April, but Clinton also believed that it would deter Saddam from all future attacks of terrorism, and that it would address the WTC bombing, too, so that Saddam would not think to carry out further attacks against the U.S.

And then the Clinton administration put out a false and fraudulent explanation for terrorism, saying that terrorism was no longer state-sponsored, but carried out by individuals. That false and fraudulent explanation was accepted and allowed Saddam to continue to attack the U.S. The reason Clinton dealt with terrorism in that fashion was because he did not understand the kind of threat that Saddam could pose, and by taking care of the terrorism in New York in that fashion, he avoided riling American public opinion, which might have demanded then, back in 1993, that he do a great deal more.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Do you believe this will eventually escalate into a much broader conflict as other states are identified as helping terrorist organizations?

MYLROIE: I believe that it is necessary to shift the war to Iraq and to do so as soon as possible, because Iraq is a primary threat, the primary terrorist threat to the United States, and as the anthrax shows, that threat can become very, very great. It's necessary to get rid of Saddam.

CNN: The George W. Bush administration publicly focuses on Osama bin Laden and remains internally at odds over whether to implicate Hussein and Iraq in the current war. Is that a mistake?

MYLROIE: Yes, it is a mistake to avoid implicating Iraq, or to be unable to reach a decision about that. If we do not say that we suspect Iraq in the anthrax attacks, then Saddam will have no reason not to escalate to the next step. The next step could be that anthrax used in another fashion which is more deadly, or it could be anthrax that is resistant to antibiotics. We won't be able to treat it, as we can now.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Have you spoken with officials about this information?

MYLROIE: Yes I have spoken with officials, in particular in the Pentagon. The Pentagon shares this view.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: You mentioned the bentonite in the anthrax, and yet we hear that the CIA and FBI are looking at home sources of that anthrax? Why are they not also viewing that as from Iraq rather than a U.S. source?

MYLROIE: That is a good question. Bob Bartley in the Wall Street Journal takes on that question. While one might say it is not impossible that an individual who is very knowledgeable, with access to a good lab, could have produced that in the U.S., it is also extremely unlikely. Iraq is a much more likely candidate. Bartley compares it to the situation of the elephant in the room that some people just don't want to see, including, apparently, the FBI and the CIA. But the American people can see the elephant in the room, and Iraq is a much more likely suspect than an individual in the U.S.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is it possible that perhaps Iraq is waiting for us to accuse them and then take anthrax to the next level?

MYLROIE: We are in a very, very difficult situation. If we say clearly that it is Iraq, and we're going to get Saddam, then it is likely that he will do his best to bring his enemies down with him. It is true that we face the danger then of more deadly attacks, including anthrax attacks. If we do not say it is Saddam, we will also face the danger of more deadly attacks. This is a terrible situation. Yet I prefer to deal with the losses that will come by taking on Saddam than to be subject to the losses that will occur if we remain sitting ducks. It would seem that some ambiguity in the beginning is the best thing. If we shift the focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, we are indeed at war, and during war, extreme measures may have to be taken. For example, we might think to get children and all non-essential personnel out of U.S. cities while this war goes on, which we will carry out very quickly, or to have people remaining in U.S. cities where they are a target, wearing masks pretty much all the time, in order to deal with this problem which we should address quickly rather than slowly.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is the reason behind the government not admitting to Iraq's involvement over the oil situation?

MYLROIE: I don't think that the oil situation is a factor. I think that at least two things are at work. First, there is a great confusion because for eight years Clinton treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue, with the emphasis on arresting individuals and bringing them to justice, trying and convicting them. That had the effect of obscuring the role of states in terrorism, particularly Iraq. But in addition, those who went along with his view of terrorism are now personally invested in it, and they are reluctant to give up that view. That would include George Tenet, a Clinton appointee who still heads the CIA, and I believe, the intelligence coming from the CIA is skewed. It may also be that there is an influence of former President Bush and Bush's top advisors from the 1991 Gulf War on President Bush. Some of those people, including former President Bush, Brent Scocroft, his national security advisor, Colin Powell, have not acknowledged that it was an error to end the war in 1991 with Saddam in power, and that may color their judgment now.

This is what Clarke is talking about when he relates Wolfowitz's seemingly bizarre contention that the terrorism priority was "Iraqi terrorism against the United States." And it explains why these fruitcakes were able to convince lil' Junior that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. We should all feel much safer knowing that this total nutcase is one of the Right's leading intellectuals, influencing the highest reaches of the Bush administration.

Say, has anybody talked to Laurie lately about Saddam's anthrax stocks that were all set to be released in balsa wood drone planes over Baltimore and Cleveland? What ever happened with that?

Update:Josh says that the usual suspects are parroting the same lies even today...



digby 3/23/2004 04:10:00 PM |

 
The Bad Kerrey

I am reminded why I came to loathe Bob Kerrey. He's one of those self-serving "bi-partisan" iconoclasts who refuses to deal in the real world. His questioning of Cohen is typical.

The idea that Clinton, in the fall of 2000, could have invaded Afghanistan without the support of congress, any of our allies or the American people is so ludicrous I can't believe he's even making the argument. Apparently, Bob thinks that it is perfectly permissable, indeed it is required, that a president make military decisions in a complete political vacuum.

Clearly, the Clinton administration could only prepare a response to the Cole bombing, (which nobody in the entire world saw as such an imminent threat that it required all out war) that they had every reason to believe would likely be carried out by the next administration, be it Gore or Bush. That's the way our bi-partisan foreign policy used to work and it is the way it should work. If Bob Kerrey or anybody else thinks that a lame duck president should go it alone and invade a country without any political support at home or abroad just one month before the presidential elections he has a hole in his head.

As Cohen pointed out, the Republican congress was a bunch of rabid dogs who had no qualms about accusing Clinton of everything from rape to treason. Invading Afghanistan against the wishes of the military and the rest of the world, ignoring all of the political considerations would have been insane. Kerrey is, as he's always been at least half the time, a useless grandstanding tool for the GOP on this stuff. You can certainly criticize Clinton for a lot of things in this matter, but this isn't one of them.

I don't even think Bush could could have invaded Afghanistan before 9/11. Up to now, I was just wishing he would have, you know, acted like he gave a shit and did what he could to thwart what everybody seemed to know was a big plot, likely on American soil. It had worked with the millenium bombing and there is ample evidence that we might have "connected the dots" if a little more attention had been paid. I didn't realize that we are now saying that Clinton or Bush should have willy nilly invaded Afghanistan without any support of anybody, including the military.

Update: Yglesias has more on Kerrey's backing of Chalabi and the INC (along with --- surprise --- our good friend Joe Loserman.)

He also appeared on Matthews making the same self-serving tough guy points. However, Trent Lott came on soon after and had the predictable effect of making Kerrey look moderate, sane and reasonable by comparison. Context is everything, I guess.



digby 3/23/2004 11:50:00 AM |

 
Chapter One

For those who are curious about the juicy details of Clarke's book, Tim at the road to surfdom is excerpting and commenting on it. Here's just one little tasty bit:

On one screen, I could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. "How's it going over here?" I asked.

"It's fine, Major Fenzel whispered, "but I can't hear the crisis conference because Mrs Cheney keeps turning down the volume so she can hear CNN...and the Vice President keeps hanging up the line to you." Mrs Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected. Like her husband, she was a right wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker.

Try to imagine if Hillary....

These excerpts are in addition to his interesting posts from yesterday on The Age Of Sacred Terror, one of the authors of which, Daniel Benjamin, appeared on CNN yesterday backing Clarke up all the way.

BLITZER: Clarke is the latest former Bush administration official to question the handling of the war on terror. The former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said the Bush White House was looking to out of Saddam Hussein from the very start of the administration.

And the former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay who found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has questioned the intelligence the Bush administration used to justify the war against Saddam Hussein.

So is Richard Clarke a courageous whistle-blower or an angry ex- employee with an axe to grind? Joining us is another former national security council staffer, Dan Benjamin, was director of counterterrorism in the Clinton administration. He's the co-author of the book "The Age of Sacred Terror." You worked for Richard Clarke the Clinton White House.

DAN BENJAMIN, DIRECTOR, COUNTERTERRORISM IN CLINTON ADMINISTRATION: That's correct. For the last two years of the '90s.

BLITZER: So what do you make of his allegations?

BENJAMIN: His allegations track with what the discontent he was expressing for quite awhile after the new team came into office in January of 2001.

And I have to say that his critique of the emphases in the war on terror also tracks with what a lot of us in the counterterrorism community have been saying. It very much stands up to what we have said in our book, "The Age of Sacred Terror."

BLITZER: But the White House is coming back and saying, you know what? You had eight years in the Clinton administration to get rid of Osama bin Laden, to destroy the al Qaeda. You had repeated terror threats, the first World Trade Center, the Cole, the twin embassy bombings. You didn't do it over eight years.

BENJAMIN: Well there's no question it was a tragedy that we couldn't get him in those first eight years. But what is also the case is that we were working flat-out to get him. We found out how hard it is to get him. We've been working flat-out since 9/11 and have still not been able to find and to capture, kill bin Laden.

I think Dick's argument here is that we could have done better and might have had more successes and possibly even more prevention had we been working flat-out after the new team came in in January 2001.

BLITZER: Which raises this question, he was a career federal civil servant, highly respected going back to earlier Republican administrations as well. Were you surprised when he was held over into the Bush administration?

BENJAMIN: Not very. Dick is first of all deeply patriotic, he is eager to work for the government. I think that his whole life was invested in this kind of work. And I think he found it deeply rewarding to be so close to these issues, to really work on national security.

This has been his entire life. So I wasn't very surprised. And I must say he's also been very, very highly valued in Washington. He's known as an insider's insider who knows where all the levers and pullies are in government.

BLITZER: At the same time he was demoted at the beginning. During the Clinton administration, he had a cabinet-level jobs as counterterrorism czar. And he was demoted to a certain degree in the Bush administration.

BENJAMIN: During the Clinton administration, at end, he had a place at table as someone who was going to speak specifically for counterterrorism issues. And he was made national coordinator for counterterrorism.

He was stripped of that rank when the new team came in because frankly they didn't think that terrorism was such a big issue that any one person should be at the table to speak for it.

And historically, that has meant that terrorism has not been taken as seriously in the discussions of national security policy.

BLITZER: The other charge that they're making against Richard Clarke is that his -- one of his best friends, Rand Beers, worked for you on the Clinton administration on the National Security Council. He teach, of course, with him at Harvard, at the Kennedy School. And that Rand Beers is now one of the top national security advisers to John Kerry.

In other words, politics behind these allegations.

BENJAMIN: I don't think it's politics because I think Dick is doing so well in the private sector with his consulting and with his speaking that I don't think he's looking for a way to get back in.

And what's more is everyone in Washington, everyone in the political world knows exactly what Dick's strengths are and his failings.

I don't think he needs to audition for a job. This is because he felt strongly about the issues.

BLITZER: Are you surprised the way the White House is now going after him?

BENJAMIN: I'm not surprised. These are very, very serious accusations. And in fact, they go to the president's perceived strength in the election. Of course, they're going to fight back hard.

BLITZER: One final question. One of the charges the vice president made and others in the White House is once he was demoted at the start of the administration, he didn't attend a lot of the high- level meetings where the decision were made.

So as a result, he didn't know what the president and vice president were really doing to fight Osama bin Laden.

BENJAMIN: Well that's impossible. Dick was the pointman in charge of coordinating counterterrorism policy. If he didn't know what the policy was, and he didn't know what steps were being taken, then no one did. And there was no policy.

So it's simply inconceivable. If there were principals' levels meetings on terrorism, he had to be there.

One of Tim's commenters mentions that my good friend Jim Wilkinson was all over FOXNews calling it "a book of lies." He also appears on this Blitzer transcript rebutting Benjamin, in full character assassination mode, almost frothing at the mouth:

JAMES WILKINSON, DEP. NATL. SECURITY ADVISER: You know when I go try to buy this book tonight I'm going to look probably in the fantasy fiction section of my local bookstore. But there are so many inaccuracies in this book. For example, he says that he could never get a meeting. He asked for one meeting with the president of the United States. He asked for that during this time of research and he to briefed on cybersecurity. I brought an email I want to read to you. He claims he could never get a meeting yet, Wolf, I work for Condi Rice and we meet with her every single morning in the situation room. Anyone is welcome to come to those meetings and Dick Clarke refused to come to those meetings. He thought they were beneath him. Let me read you a note that was sent to him.

"Condi noted your absence this morning and asked me to remind you of the importance she attaches to the meeting and her expectation that all senior directors will be there."

Why didn't Dick Clarke go to these meetings? Let me remind you, it was Dick Clarke that was in charge of terrorism for this country when the attacks on the USS Cole happened. It was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country when the attacks on the embassies in Africa happened. It was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country when the threat was building towards 9/11 and it was Dick Clarke who was in charge of terrorism for this country in June when the FBI said 16 of 19 hijackers were already here, Wolf. And on the day of 9/11, he was giving a speech on cybersecurity. This book is full of so many inaccuracies.

BLITZER: What about...

WILKINSON: Wolf, let me finish. The terrorists weren't overseas, the terrorists were here in America. By June, the FBI says 16 of 19 terrorists in the 9/11 attacks were already here. I just don't see what this focus on process and titles and meetings. Let me also point something. If you look in this book you find interesting things such as reported in the "Washington Post" this morning. He's talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of "X-Files" stuff, and this is a man in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who is supposed to be focused on it and he was focused on meetings.

BLITZER: What about the other charge that he makes is that the president and the vice president, the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of defense, they were all literally obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq after 9/11, even though the CIA and the FBI repeatedly told them Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or 9/11.

WILKINSON: Let me ask the question this way, let me go even further than you. Wouldn't your viewers have found it strange if the president didn't ask about Iraq? Wouldn't they have found it strange if they didn't order his counterterrorism team and his FBI director and his intelligence director to look in every corner of the globe for who might be involved? I just don't see the point with all this Iraq business.

I was working at central command for the last year as you know from our time together. In the northern and southern no-fly zone, Iraq was shooting at our pilots hundreds of times a day. Iraq had dug in deep. Iraq was threatening its neighbors. I just don't see the point of this Iraq connection. I think the American people would be comforted to know that this president wanted to know everything possible. I want to bring up another point, Wolf.

I brought with me a copy of the January issue of "Publisher's Weekly." It shows that this was supposed to come out April 27 of this year. Do you think it's a coincidence, and you've been in this town a long, could it be a coincidence that this book is released the very week he's giving his public testimony before the 9/11 commission. A commission we've spent hours with. We've given documents, 800 tapes, cooperating with fully and private, working on these sorts of issues. Is that a coincidence? I think the publisher and Dick Clarke have some answering to do. Why is he focused on book tours and these sorts of things. He should have been focused on terrorism like this president is.

Can you believe this shit? Clarke shouldn't be "focused on book tours" because he should have been focused on terrorism like the president is now. OK. And, you've got to love, "I just don't see the point of this Iraq connection."

Wilkinson needs to lay off the coffee and krispy kreme's. He's bordering on incoherence.

Tim also mentions Kevin Drum's opinion that the Bush administration is being foolish not to admit to what he thinks is a reasonable explanation as to why they didn't care much about terrorism:

The answer seems pretty simple to me: most people before 9/11 thought of terrorism as simply one among many foreign policy problems. There wasn't really any compelling reason to develop a crash program to deal with it.

I think that is missing the whole point of Clarke's story, frankly. I don't think it's unreasonable that the administration might not have known the scope of the terrorist threat before taking office. But, the minute they entered the White House, the entire national security establishment was warning them about it and they blew them off. That's the entire thrust of what Clarke, Benjamin, Kerrick and others have all said which is that the Bush administration was distinctly uninterested in terrorism even though throughout the spring and summer of 2001 people were screaming that there was a huge amount of chatter and something really big was about to happen. They were focused on Iraq and missile defense and the rest of their fossilized agenda despite what all of the experts were telling them.

And besides, it really shouldn't have been a surprise. I knew that al Qaeda was the likely culprit the minute I saw the WTC with a big hole in it and I'm no terrorism expert. The African embassy bombings were in 1998. The USS Cole was bombed in October of 2000 (which, considering the total lack of bipartisan patriotism on the part of Republicans, explains why Clinton didn't move on al Qaeda then. The GOP thugs would have tried to impeach him again for wagging the dog on behalf of Gore in the presidential campaign. I'm sure that was another reason why they counterterrorism guys were were just a little bit surprised when the Bush people told them to take a hike.)

The issue of terrorism may not have been on a hot burner in most Americans' minds, but after the millenium plot was foiled I think everybody certainly assumed that the government was very much aware of and working on the threat. The Clinton team was. The Bushies weren't --- and we paid, bigtime. That's why Clarke came forward.


Update: Read this great post by Avedon on the subject. Fiesty and wise.



digby 3/23/2004 02:08:00 AM |

Monday, March 22, 2004

 
Running Of The Bullshit

In an interview on PBS television Thursday, Wolfowitz said Zapatero's withdrawal plan didn't seem very Spanish.

"The Spaniards are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of bullfighting," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven't run in the face of the Basque terrorists. I hope they don't run in the face of these people."

I'm beginning to think that the lead in the water in DC is a much bigger problem that we realize.



digby 3/22/2004 09:20:00 PM |

 
All Hail Howard Dean

I knew he was the right man for the job. I am still not as sangiune about Nader as everyone else seems to be:

Dr. Dean's new Rx:

"To that end, according to a well-placed source close to Dean, Kerry and Dean have discussed Dean's projected role in challenging Ralph Nader, whose fourth run for president has Democrats, Independents and even some Greens apoplectic. Dean has been careful to praise Nader's accomplishments before urging people not to be seduced by a quixotic campaign. This is a tactical move to avoid driving people into Nader's arms by being too combative. But should Nader manage to get on the ballot in some key states and threaten to throw them to Bush, expect the gloves to come off."

digby 3/22/2004 08:14:00 PM |

 
In The Supreme Court is suspicious. By Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate, she discussed the case I referenced below in my post about a national ID card. The case was heard by the court today:

One after another dismisses the national ID card debate as not at issue here. One after another suggests—and to a rather frightening degree, at times—that this case has nothing to do with innocent people, or ordinary people. This case has to do with "suspicious" people, and—as you were no doubt aware—suspicious people are not like you or me.

[...]

We all seem to want to live in the world inhabited by most of the justices: where our names are private, and no one needs to incriminate themselves—unless some policeman decides they are suspicious. Then, there is a duty, a responsibility, a constitution-negating requirement that you come forward—to use Scalia's formulation—and cooperate. This idea that the "suspicious people" (read: dark-skinned, poor, urban etc.) have some heightened duty to cooperate with the police is utterly backward, in light of the police's historical treatment of them. It's a shame Justice Clarence Thomas doesn't speak today. One can imagine that he has at least some idea of what it means to hold "suspicious" people to a different constitutional standard.

Read the whole thing. Somehow I'm getting the idea that the court is in the process of abandoning legal principle generally in favor of some sort of "common sense" view of the law that says the government can do what it wants because an innocent person has nothing to worry about.



digby 3/22/2004 07:01:00 PM |

 
Clarke and Wolfowitz and Mylroie

Matthew Yglesias says:

...you really ought to read Peter Bergen's article on Laurie Mylroie. Especially in light of Wolfowitz's pre-9/11 remark (reported in Clarke's book) that rather than go after al-Qaeda we should go after Saddam Hussein because he sponsored terrorism against the United States it appears more and more to be the case here that a big part of the problem is simply that Wolfowitz is a believer in her conspiracy theory. I've heard in a second-hand kind of way that this is the case, and Clarke's stuff seems to lend that account even more plausibility than what Bergen gives us.

Actually, there's quite a bit more evidence. In a post from last August, in which I wrote about this Wolfowitz/Mylroie connection I linked to Josh Marshall's reporting on the backround controversy surrounding Sam Tannenhaus' article on Wolfowitz in the August 2003 issue of Vanity Fair. Josh said:

As noted here a couple days ago, the Tanenhaus article says that Wolfowitz is "confident" that Saddam played some role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that he had "entertained" the notion that Saddam had played some role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. (Tanenhaus sources Wolfowitz's ideas about Oklahoma City to a "longtime friend" of the Deputy Secretary.)

The exact quotes remain on backround and have never been revealed. But, in an earlier story, Time magazine reported:

One reason so many hawks seemed ready to make the case for retaliating against Saddam as well as bin Laden may have been the influence of Laurie Mylroie, a conservative scholar who had convinced herself and a number of influential conservatives, although not the U.S. intelligence community, that Iraq had been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was very likely behind 9/11, too. But as eccentric as her argument was to the U.S. intelligence community, it was hailed by Wolfowitz, who wrote in a blurb to her book that it "argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually an agent of Iraqi intelligence." And invade-Iraq cheerleader Richard Perle, formerly head of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, wrote in his own blurb: "Laurie Myroie has amassed convincing evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. If she is right, and there are simple ways to test her hypothesis, we would be justified in concluding that Saddam was probably involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks as well."

Clarke said that after 9/11 Wolfowitz wondered why the government was spending so much time on one apparently irrelevant man. Two days after the attacks, Wolfowitz made his famous Al Haig style comment in which he said (and which was slapped down immediately by Colin Powell):

I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign.

It is indisputable that Wolfowitz swallowed whole the ridiculous theory that terrorists are unable to function without state sponsorship, as his comments above illustrate. This theory was set forth again last July by Mylroie testimony before congress in which she said:

Prior to the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, it was assumed that major terrorist attacks against the U.S. were state-sponsored. But that bombing is said to mark the start of a new kind of terrorism that does not involve states.

That notion is dubious. Rather, the claim that a new, stateless terrorism emerged with the 1993 Trade Center bombing was a convenient explanation in that it required no military response. Once promulgated, it was hastily accepted--even before much progress had been made in the investigation of that attack itself.

There isn't time to properly address that issue in this testimony. Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America contains the fullest account of this author's argument that there is no new source of major terrorist attacks on the U.S. They were state-sponsored--and remain so. That that is not understood is the result of a major intelligence and policy failure that occurred in the 1990s.

In the time allotted here, I want to address three major terrorist plots that have been attributed to so-called "loose networks," including al Qaeda, and illustrate that there is significant evidence to suggest that Iraq was involved: the 1993 Trade Center bombing; the 1995 plot in the Philippines to bomb a dozen US airplanes; and the 9/11 attacks.

According to Tannenhaus, as of August 2003 Wolfowitz still agreed with her about the WTC bombings. Perhaps by then he had accepted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but his statements right after the attacks certainly comport with what Richard Clarke reports was his reaction to the information that Al Qaeda was to blame.






digby 3/22/2004 02:22:00 PM |

Sunday, March 21, 2004

 
Loser

Via SK Bubba I finally got to see the clip of the notorious Dennis Miller Eric Alterman "interview."

I don't think Jon Stewart has anything to worry about. Conservatives are not funny and they aren't entertaining. It's just a fact.


digby 3/21/2004 08:45:00 PM |

 
Big Night

Clarke's interview was even more devastating than I anticipated. Perhaps it was his delivery and demeanor, but it was the single most hard hitting criticism I've yet heard of Bush's terrorism policy. His charges were very ineffectually rebutted by Steven Hadley who seemed to be describing a Bob Woodward daydream rather than the Bush Whitehouse. Nobody ever really believed that Bush was in charge, particularly before 9/11. Even those who support the Bush administration always trusted in his advisors --- the vaunted grown-ups. In light of these charges, Hadley's description of Bush fighting his own team and insisting that the terrorism threat be a priority is embarrassingly absurd.

I have had some conversations recently with independent men who were completely persuaded after 9/11 that Bush was a ballsy guy who would do what needed to be done. They believe that the government knew things that the rest of us couldn't possibly have known. But, when they see a guy like Clarke, the ultimate non-partisan expert/insider saying that what we knew was ignored, these fellows are going to be pissed. If Bush loses these guys, he loses the election.

This may be the most important moment of the campaign. Bush's only real strength is the hagiography that was carefully cultivated after the attacks. Without that, they have very little. In fact, he becomes a failure of epic proportions. His entire campaign rests on the idea that Bush handled 9/11 flawlessly.

The press must be pushed on this. I already knew all of this stuff and it seemed very powerful to me. I would hope that the media would feel the heat from this story as well. The Democrats need to get together and push this over the next week, as the testimony at the hearings is highlighted. It is the chink in Bush's codpiece and it's time to administer a deadly blow.



digby 3/21/2004 07:35:00 PM |

 
Show Me Your Papers

Kevin the Political Animal muses about a national ID card, wondering a bit why some people are so adamantly against it. But, he has some reservations after reading this post by Mark Kleiman in which Mark wondered if it might be a good idea to curtail people's ability to buy alcohol rather than their ability to drive by using the drivers license to designate that a person convicted of an alcohol related offense isn't allowed to drink --- just as minors' drivers licenses do. Kevin then asks:

...when a driver's license starts becoming overtly more than just a driver's license, where does it end? Once people get the idea that it can be used to regulate more than just driving, why not use the same card to regulate and track sex offenders? Or resident aliens? Or handgun licensing? Or criminal records? It would be mighty handy to have all that stuff in one place, wouldn't it?

Yes it would and that is just one of the reasons you can add me to the list of libertarian wackos who are horrified at the prospect of a national ID card. It's not out of a knee jerk hatred of government, it's out of a lifetime observing bureaucrats, cops and politicians. I don't trust bureaucrats to handle information well; they screw it up a lot already and it's only getting worse with more information about individuals that's being collected.

This is one of the main arguments against the CAPPS II system, which is really a beta test of a national ID card database. Aside from a humongous error rate, and total unaccountability, you can see that the slippery slope has already had an effect. Here's how Anita Ramasastry explains the problem in a column from last Wednesday on FindLaw:

CAPPS II is designed to use commercial and government data to verify passenger identity, and to decide whether individual fliers pose security risks. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the agency tasked with implementing this program.

The program was initially intended to detect terrorists and keep them off airplanes. In August 2003, however, TSA announced that CAPPS II would also serve as a law enforcement tool to identify individuals wanted for violent crimes.

Based on privacy concerns that I have discussed in a previous column, Congress voted to block funding for CAPPS II unless the TSA could satisfy eight criteria relating to privacy, security, accuracy and oversight. (TSA may, at this time, move forward in testing CAPPS II, however.) In addition, Congress also asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to conduct a review of CAPPS II to determine whether it met the relevant criteria.

This February, that report came in. And it concluded that CAPPS II has numerous problems, as I will explain.

Then today, March 17, a second report was released by the DHS. It confirmed that the TSA was involved in the transfer of JetBlue Airways passenger information to a Department of Defense subcontractor, Torch Concepts, for use in a data mining study (which I also discussed in an earlier column). Moreover, the DHS report found that, "The TSA employees involved acted without appropriate regard for individual privacy interests or the spirit of the Privacy Act of 1974."

[...]

Readers may object that we can live with a few errors in order to get greater security. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has pointed out that even a small error rate would create huge problems.

With CAPPS II checking an estimated billion transactions, the ACLU points out, "[e]ven if we assume an unrealistic accuracy rate of 99.9%, mistakes will be made on approximately one million transactions, and 100,000 separate individuals." (Emphasis added.) So even a tiny error rate will lead to many, many errors.

She also note that the commercial information they included such as credit reports are notoriously subject to error (or criminal manipulation as with identity theft) and much government information is secret and unchallegeable. The slippery slope is already in force as the TSA --- the Transportation Safety Administration is now in the business of helping law enforcement track down criminals. Why would they stop at that? How about IRS leins, bounced checks, or criminal convictions? And certainly there is no reason that they wouldn't use political activity as a criteria. In fact, they seem to have done that already.

As for law enforcement, I believe we need to hold the line on the fourth amendment in general. If we require people to have a national ID card, then it stands to reason that we will also be required to show it to law enforcement. And it won't be just another picture ID, it will likely be a hi-tech card with a magnetic strip that connects to a huge amount of information that I don't think the police have a right to access without probable cause. Right now a case is before the Supreme Court challenging a Nevada law that makes it a crime for a person to refuse to identify himself to police.

Under Nevada law, a citizen must reveal his or her name to a police officer who has reasonable suspicion that the person might be involved in a crime. Even if the suspect is innocent, the mere act of refusing to identify oneself is - itself - a crime.

Analysts say the law creates a legal irony. If the police officer possessed enough evidence to place the suspect under arrest, the suspect would be given a Miranda warning that he or she had the right to remain silent. But if the police officer possessed only reasonable suspicion - not the higher standard of probable cause needed to justify an arrest - a suspect could be arrested and convicted merely for refusing to identify himself.

[...]

In urging the US Supreme Court to overturn his conviction, Hiibel and his lawyers argue that police are free to ask a suspect any questions they want, but the suspect does not have to answer.

A law that can send someone to jail for refusing to speak violates both Fourth Amendment privacy protections and Fifth Amendment guarantees against being compelled to make incriminating statements, they say. "It is inimical to a free society that mere silence can lead to imprisonment," writes James Logan, a Nevada public defender and one of Hiibel's lawyers, in his brief to the court.

The Nevada Attorney General's Office counters that the state's interest in investigating crimes outweighs Hiibel's interest in keeping his identity private. "A person does not have a Fourth Amendment right to refuse to identify himself when detained on reasonable suspicion," says Conrad Hafen, senior deputy attorney general, in his brief. Asking someone's name is a minimal intrusion, Mr. Hafen says. Rather than forcing a suspect to make incriminating statements, repeating one's name does not provide evidence of a crime but merely assists an investigation, he says.

"Though the name may link the person to an outstanding warrant, it does not compel the person to inform the officer that he has an outstanding warrant," Hafen says. "A person's name is more like a fingerprint, voice exemplar, or handwriting analysis. It is used by law enforcement to identify the person."

Experts in electronic privacy disagree. "A name is now no longer a simple identifier: it is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features of an individual's life," says Marc Rotenberg, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

A national ID card would make it simpler to access all that information that the government has no business knowing unless they have probable cause to believe you have committed a crime. It should not be simple. Law enforcement should have to make a case before a judge in order to get it.

I don't trust politicians ever to do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts. Privacy and freedom are so closely linked in my mind as to be the same thing and they must be protected in law with sufficient safeguards against political repression and government surveillance. Allowing the government to access commercial information and generate even more, while requiring citizens to carry and produce a card that has the means for any government representative to access it, is a recipe for a police state. I know that sounds hysterical, but these things do happen, even to free nations if they don't remain vigilant against it.




digby 3/21/2004 06:27:00 PM |

 
Jon Stewart Wonders:

"Are they going to make us marry gay?"


"I think it must be mandatory because why else would anybody care? Unless the government is going to force you to make man-love, I really don't know why it would keep you up at night."

Little does he know that the next step is mandatory polygamous man-on-dog love with Fido and Fifi, as well. It's only a matter of time.

Via: The Sideshow





digby 3/21/2004 02:39:00 PM |

 
Preserved In Amber

I can't wait for this interview with Richard Clarke on 60 minutes and I can't wait to read the book. Judging by this article on the CBS website, it looks to be a doozy, as predicted.

First we find out that Rumsfeld wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/11. This does not surprise me. He wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/10 and the attacks on the WTC were a dandy excuse to go ahead with it. But, what's interesting is Clarke's account of the meeting in which he said it as opposed to the account of that meeting as duly recorded by Bob Woodward.

Woodward's version has a bold and manly Bush taking charge of his confused and befuddled advisors who have more questions than answers until the steely-eyed rocket man gives them proper direction:

Shortly after 9:30 p.m., President Bush brought together his most senior national security advisers in a bunker beneath the White House grounds. It was just 13 hours after the deadliest attack on the U.S. homeland in the country's history...

"This is the time for self-defense," he told his aides, according to National Security Council notes. Then, repeating the vow he had made earlier in the evening in a televised address from the Oval Office, he added: "We have made the decision to punish whoever harbors terrorists, not just the perpetrators."

Their job, the president said, was to figure out how to do it.

That afternoon, on a secure phone on Air Force One, Bush had already told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he would order a military response and that Rumsfeld would be responsible for organizing it. "We'll clean up the mess," the president told Rumsfeld, "and then the ball will be in your court."

Intelligence was by now almost conclusive that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, based in Afghanistan, had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the aides gathered in the bunker-the "war cabinet" that included Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and CIA Director George J. Tenet-were not ready to say what should be done about them. The war cabinet had questions, no one more than Rumsfeld.

Who are the targets? How much evidence do we need before going after al Qaeda? How soon do we act? While acting quickly was essential, Rumsfeld said, it might take up to 60 days to prepare for major military strikes. And, he asked, are there targets that are off-limits? Do we include American allies in military strikes?

Rumsfeld warned that an effective response would require a wider war, one that went far beyond the use of military force. The United States, he said, must employ every tool available-military, legal, financial, diplomatic, intelligence.

The president was enthusiastic. But Tenet offered a sobering thought. Although al Qaeda's home base was Afghanistan, the terrorist organization operated nearly worldwide, he said. The CIA had been working the bin Laden problem for years. We have a 60-country problem, he told the group.

"Let's pick them off one at a time," Bush replied

And then he hitched up his codpiece and went to bed. It was, after all, 9:30.

Here's Clarke's version from the CBS article:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke also describes the foreign policy advisors in the administration as "preserved in amber," (much more evocative than my earlier characterization of them as fossilized) which supports my observations over the last couple of years that the central problem with these guys is that they are unable to get past the cold war mythology that hooked them somewhere in their formative years and never let them go. It's like watching a bunch of middle aged freaks at a LOTR convention. Not a pretty sight.

And what's even more staggering about all this is that they still haven't learned their lessons. CBS reports that Steven Hadley of the NSC describes the Iraq misadventure as a success by basing it on the lie that al Qaeda and Saddam were in cahoots AND on the dangerous fallacy that terrorism has something to do with rogue states:

"Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists."

Jayzuz. The bombings in Madrid, Istanbul and Bali sure as hell didn't need any rogue state sanctuary --- they were all carried out by terrorist factions loosely connected to al Qaeda and managed on local soil. I can't even begin to comment on the ridiculous concept that we've somehow provoked a positive change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But, we can be sure that the Iraq war has contributed to terrorism all right. It served as an extremely useful rallying cry and cause for manipulation for no goddamned good reason other than a total lack of imagination and openness to changing facts on the ground.

It's not only the White House that refuses to see terrorism for what it is instead of what they'd like it to be, the right wing punditocrisy is similarly clinging to their outmoded cold warrior worldview. All this talk of appeasement in the Spanish elections fails to account for the fact that it doesn't really matter how any single country reacts to these Islamic terrorist actions. You can't appease them or not appease them because they are not operating from any real premise.

Al Qaeda terrorists have a delusional view of world events that's only rivaled by the neocons here in the US. And they share a similar misunderstanding of the forces that bring about change in the world. For instance, they BOTH believed that they destroyed the Soviet Union through their own superior military prowess. I think we all know that the American right wing is dedicated to the proposition that their God Ronald Reagan single handedly ended the cold war. Osama bin Laden takes similar credit. From a 1998 interview:

Allah has granted the Muslim people and the Afghani mujahedeen, and those with them, the opportunity to fight the Russians and the Soviet Union. ... They were defeated by Allah and were wiped out. There is a lesson here. The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan late in December of '79. The flag of the Soviet Union was folded once and for all on the 25th of December just 10 years later. It was thrown in the waste basket. Gone was the Soviet union forever.

[...]

Today however, our battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. Americans have committed unprecedented stupidity. They have attacked Islam and its most significant sacrosanct symbols ... . We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.

You couldn't make this shit up. Al Qaeda thinks it brought down the Soviets and thinks it can bring down the US, too. Yep. And meanwhile, here in the new capital of Western Civilization we've got President Hopalong spewing nonsense about Good n' Evul while the SecDef says that we should bomb the countries with the best targets.

Dr. Strangelove, your table is ready.



Oh, and by the way, somebody ought to send a memo to the White House that its attempted character asissination of Clarke is extremely lame. They say he wrote this book to "audition" for the Kerry campaign. Yeah. The guy who ran counter-terrorism for Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Junior would need to audition. I hear Tom Cruise is doing a screen test for the next Mission Impossible movie, too. Paramount needs to see if he can do the job.







digby 3/21/2004 01:33:00 PM |

 
GOPUNKS


A Bush Surprise: Fright-Wing Support:

"I look like someone who should be hanging out with Marilyn Manson. In fact I have hung out with Marilyn Manson," Mr. Graves said. "It doesn't affect what my morals are."

"I think George Bush is a wonderful, competent leader," he added. "And I believe that he is bringing this country on a right and just course and he understands the true nature of evil."

I think we've finally found Ann Coulter a boyfriend.






digby 3/21/2004 11:14:00 AM |

 
Like Riding A Bike

Kevin at catch.com posts about Drudge's new obsession about Kerry falling down on a snowboard. I notice that Kaus is on the hunt, as well. I was shocked when I heard about it too. Imagine falling down while snowboarding. I think it pretty much disqualifies Kerry from the presidency.

Thank goodness we have a real athlete in the White House:



President Bush falls over the handle bars of a Segway.
digby 3/21/2004 10:59:00 AM |